Doug Enaa Greene's Blog

Originally published at Left Voice.

In 2024, the elderly David Horowitz was bedridden and severely weakened by cancer. He did not have much time left. Yet in his twilight months, Horowitz received a phone call in his hospital room. The man on the receiving end was presidential candidate Donald Trump, who was then meeting with Horowitz’s son Benjamin. Trump told an enthusiastic David that they shared the same mission of restoring American greatness and freedom. When Horowitz died on April 29, 2025, he was undoubtedly happy watching President Trump realize his — or rather their — reactionary agenda.

A Class Warrior

Horowitz was not always this way though. He was born on January 10, 1939, in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, New York to a family of Jewish Communist Party members. According to Horowitz, even though his parents had emigrated to the United States, they wanted to destroy their adopted homeland: “In the land of Washington and Lincoln, their heroes were Marx and Lenin; in democratic America, their goal was to establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Instead of being grateful to a nation that had provided them with economic opportunity and refuge, they wanted to overthrow its governing institutions and replace them with a Soviet state.”1

Horowitz is unintentionally ironic in portraying his parents as dedicated communist revolutionaries. By the time he came of age, the Communist Party (CP) was thoroughly Stalinized and had largely abandoned revolution for the needs of Soviet foreign policy. Despite the CP’s degeneration, as a red diaper baby, David did receive the rudiments of a political education where he absorbed the values of socialism. In 1949, just as the Second Red Scare chilled politics across the United States, a defiant ten-year-old David attended his first May Day demonstration. Afterward, he viewed himself “as a soldier in an international class struggle that would one day liberate all humanity from poverty, oppression, racism and war.”2

Radical Renewal

Yet Horowitz had his faith in the USSR shattered in 1956 with Khrushchev’s Secret Speech revealing Stalin’s many crimes. Later, he described his parents essentially losing their reason for being: “When my parents and their friends opened the morning Times and read its text, their world collapsed—and along with it their will to struggle. If the document was true, almost everything they had said and believed was false. Their secret mission had led them into waters so deep that its tide had overwhelmed them, taking with it the very meaning of their lives.”3

By now, Horowitz was a freshman at Columbia University as his family’s Communist Party milieu fell apart. In the coming years, Horowitz maintained his socialist convictions but largely focused on literary studies. One result of his literary pursuits was his second book, Shakespeare: An Existential View (1965).

After graduating in 1959, he moved to California, where he began graduate studies in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. It was an auspicious choice. Shortly thereafter, Berkeley became the center of New Left and radical activism that challenged the American war in Vietnam. Attracted to the movement, Horowitz organized one of the first campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War in 1962. That same year, he published Student, an early New Left text.

Afterward, Horowitz and his family moved to Sweden where he spent the next year. During this time, he wrote The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (1965). In this seminal work, Horowitz attacked the prevailing anticommunist consensus that the Soviet Union was an expansionist power and the cause of the Cold War. Rather, Horowitz located the cause of the Cold War in American capitalists and imperialist aggression. Very soon, Free World Colossus proved to be a must-read text for a new generation of radicals and was translated into multiple languages. Later, Horowitz disowned his work for legitimizing a radical worldview:

The biggest impact that my political books had would be Free World Colossus which sold about 20,000 copies over a decade. It had a very, I feel, unfortunate influence because it persuaded a lot of people of the validity of a radical perspective – which I now consider to be both false and pernicious – on the cold war, because it was used in the universities and still probably has some influence in leftist writings about the cold war.4

Mentors

It was during this same period that Horowitz was offered a job with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in London. At this time, Russell became involved in activism against the Vietnam War. In 1966, Ralph Schoenman convinced Bertrand Russell to bring together a war crimes tribunal to judge American involvement in the Vietnam War. Alongside Russell, those attending were some of the major figures of the international left such as Isaac Deutscher, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stokely Carmichael, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Dedijer, and James Baldwin. Horowitz himself claimed later that he had reservations about the tribunal and did not take part. Yet Horowitz also admitted that he was essential in helping the tribunal by raising funds. Horowitz also participated in other actions against the war. Alongside members of the Trotskyist International Marxist Group such as Tariq Ali, he helped organize the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in 1966.

While in London, he became close friends with two major European Marxists: Ralph Miliband (author of Parliamentary Socialism) and Isaac Deutscher, the famed biographer of both Trotsky and Stalin. Deutscher was an important political mentor to Horowitz and many radicals, introducing them to the revolutionary tenets of classical Marxism. As Horowitz said in 1969 in a collection he edited commemorating Deutscher: “It was Deutscher’s unique achievement that he constructed in his exile a Marxist vision of Bolshevism and its fate, which could serve as a bridge between the tradition and achievements of the old revolutionary left and the new… and of restoring meaning once again to the idea of Communism.”5

In addition, Horowitz’s Empire and Revolution (1969) was dedicated to Deutscher and bore his influence throughout its pages. In this text, Horowitz reinterpreted the Cold War, imperialism, and the USSR under a Deutscherite lens. Despite the deformations of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, he maintained hope that the workers would overthrow the ruling bureaucracy. Finally, the text ended with an unambiguous Bolshevik call for international revolution:

the continuing world-wide oppression of class, nation and race, the incalculable waste and untold misery, the unending destruction and preparation for destruction and the permanent threat to democratic order that characterize the rule of capitalism… Liberation is no longer, and can be no longer, merely a national concern. The dimension of the struggle, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks so clearly saw, is international: its road is the socialist revolution.6

Ramparts 

Having returned to the United States and settled in California by 1968, Horowitz became a co-editor of the magazine Ramparts. One of the major radical journals of the sixties, Ramparts sold nearly 250,000 copies at its height. The journal published many of the most important leftist texts of the decade such as Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro and Soul on Ice by the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver (later a writer for the journal). In 1967, when Martin Luther King Jr. publicly opposed the Vietnam War, he gave Ramparts the sole rights to publish the text of his speech.

This was an easy choice on King’s part since the main thrust of Ramparts’ energies were focused on opposing the Vietnam War. In its pages, the journal condemned various American war crimes in Vietnam such as the use of napalm. Moreover, Ramparts was instrumental in exposing the role of the CIA with the National Student Association, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the Asia Foundation.

Years later, Horowitz sorrowfully described his actions during the sixties:

While American boys were dying overseas, we spat on the flag, broke the law, denigrated and disrupted the institutions of government and education, gave comfort and aid (even revealing classified secrets) to the enemy. Some of us provided a protective propaganda shield for Hanoi’s communist regime while it tortured American fliers; others engaged in violent sabotage against the war effort.7

While he exaggerates and torture should not be condoned, Horowitz and Ramparts clearly did good work throughout these years.

Keynes and Marx

While penning articles on the global uprisings of 1968, Horowitz also considered himself a revolutionary theorist. He wrote prolifically — the only constant in his career — editing books on corporations, history, the counterculture, the Cold War, and economics. Regarding economics, Horowitz hoped to establish the centrality of Marxism in understanding capitalism and crisis: 

Nonetheless, at this historical juncture the traditional Marxist paradigm is the only economic paradigm which is capable of analyzing capitalism as an historically specific, class-determined social formation. As such it provides an indispensable framework for understanding the development and crisis of the present social system and, as an intellectual outlook, would occupy a prime place in any scientific institution worthy of the name.8

Despite proclaiming his adherence to Marxist political economy, Horowitz’s views were very unorthodox. In fact, he was quite animated by the Keynesian-style Marxism found in Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital (1966). This work ditched key components of Marx’s Capital such as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the theory of surplus value by replacing it with Keynes’ concept of economic surplus. 

The high point of Horowitz’s engagement with this heterodox school can be found in his edited collection, Marx and Modern Economics (1968). Here, Horowitz summarizes a great deal of literature on the relationship between Marxism and bourgeois economists. In his introduction, Horowitz sees the possibility of a convergence between Marxism and mainstream economics through the medium of Keynes. This is reflected in the choice of chapters which include leftists influenced by Keynes such as Joan Robinson, Oskar Lange, Paul Sweezy, and Paul Baran. The introduction approvingly quoted Robinson: “If there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx.” Horowitz added: “It is the Marxists, alone, who have been ready to take up the challenge.”9

While Horowitz’s own revolutionary commitments remained intact, his embrace of Keynes was an early sign of a rightward shift. Like Sweezy and Baran, Horowitz dropped the essentials of Marxist political economy for bourgeois liberalism. As a result, he was unable to explain the material necessity for socialism that grew out of capitalism’s internal laws of motion. Horowitz, like Baran and Sweezy, was forced to deny the revolutionary role of the working class and look for salvation from amorphous “outcasts.” While his understanding of socialism was not scientifically grounded, Horowitz’s revolutionary faith meant he refused to give up the struggle.

The Break

By the early seventies, radicalism was beginning to lose steam. The mass movements of the previous decade began to shrink and horizons for a socialist future receded. Unknown to Horowitz and others, an era of conservative retrenchment was about to begin. While many leftists began to question the validity of socialism altogether, Horowitz attempted to carry on but was feeling the strain too. As he admitted in The Fate of Midas (1973): “In the present historical context, the work of a radical intellectual is inevitably a lonely enterprise10

In addition, the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago with its exposure of the Stalinist gulag further shook Horowitz’s commitments: “I had grown up in an environment where the Soviet Union was the focus of all progressive hopes and political efforts. My acute sense of our complicity in these crimes made it difficult for me to read more than a few pages of Solzhenitsyn’s text at a single sitting.”11

While burdened and strained, Horowitz pressed on. By the early seventies, he developed a close friendship with Huey P. Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party. Even though the Panthers were one of the most militant groups of the sixties, they were now in deep decline due to COINTELPRO repression and internal infighting. In many respects, both Newton and the Panthers had severely degenerated. Yet Horowitz was convinced by Newton that the Panthers were leaving behind their simplistic violence and embracing a more creative politics focused on community service.

As Horowitz worked with the Panthers to fundraise, he introduced a friend named Betty Van Patter to work as their bookkeeper. In December 1974, Van Patter went missing. A month later, her broken and decomposed body was found in San Francisco Bay. Almost immediately, Horowitz believed that the Panthers were responsible for her murder.

Along with the waning radical movement and his growing doubts about socialism, this was Horowitz’s breaking point. His whole identity and dedication to Marxism shattered: 

The Marxist idea, to which I had devoted my entire intellectual life and work, was false… For the first time in my conscious life I was looking at myself in my human nakedness, without the support of revolutionary hopes, without the faith in a revolutionary future —without the sense of self-importance conferred by the role I would play in remaking the world. For the first time in my life I confronted myself as I really was in the endless march of human coming and going. I was nothing.12

Second Thoughts

Over the following decade, Horowitz largely withdrew from active politics. In addition to Van Patter’s murder, he was also going through a bitter divorce with his wife after an affair with Abby Rockefeller (while working on a study of the Rockefeller Family). For the time being, Horowitz retreated and attempted to rebuild his life. 

In March 1985, he finally came out from the cold. Horowitz and his former Ramparts collaborator Peter Collier published an essay for the Washington Post called “Goodbye to All That,” where they announced their conversion to Ronald Reagan’s anticommunist crusade. According to Horowitz and Collier, “communism is simply left-wing fascism” and the USSR was an “evil empire.”13

With the fervor of a newly minted convert, Horowitz was compelled to preach his new anticommunist gospel. In 1987, he found himself in Nicaragua at the behest of Elliott Abrams, an Assistant Secretary of State, to oppose the leftwing Sandinista government. While there, he cheered on the Contras — right-wing terrorists backed by the U.S. — who had murdered 30,000 Nicaraguans. Two years later, Horowitz attended a conference in Kraków, Poland calling for the end of Communism and praising the “wisdom” of free market fundamentalist Friedrich von Hayek.

In 1987, Horowitz hosted a “Second Thoughts Conference” in Washington, D.C. composed of former leftists such as Ronald Radosh, Joshua Muravchik, Fausto Amador, and P. J. O’Rouke. The attendees spent their time repenting for their radical sins and warning about the ever-present dangers of “communist totalitarianism.” As the radical journalist Alexander Cockburn observed, the Second Thoughts Conference was merely an opportunity for Horowitz and company to cash in:

Then [Horowitz and Collier] decided to become right-wingers and jumped on the Reagan bandwagon at more or less exactly the moment it ran finally out of steam. Since then they have gone around sucking money out of right-wing foundations in the cause of something called Second Thoughts. The less people have any interest in what they say, the crazier they’ve become, which is usually the case with self-advertising turncoats.14

The Poor Plagiarizer

The last forty years of Horowitz’s life was spent as a reactionary attack dog. He founded a number of conservative foundations that received generous donations from rightwing donors. During the “War on Terror,” Horowitz was second-to-none in his attacks on the political left for treason. While Horowitz bemoaned leftist “cancel culture” and their supposed attacks on free speech on college campuses, his “academic bill of rights” was an aggressive attempt to expose leftist teachers and drive them from academia. Naturally, he was now a rabid Zionist, homophobe, and racist. Let no one say that Horowitz did not go all in.

While Horowitz remained productive up to the very end, nothing of his later works bears any originality. His defenses of conservative politics sound more like Fox News soundbites than something written by Edmund Burke. His analytical abilities clearly declined with his apostasy. As a leftist, Horowitz was clearly aware of the differences that separated Marxists from the bourgeois imperialists of the Democratic Party. As a conservative, he lumped them all together and the Democrats appeared as another radical organization hellbent on destroying America. It is a notion that the Horowitz of 1968 would have scoffed at due to its sheer stupidity. 

As part of his new conservative branding, Horowitz never missed an opportunity to tout his credentials as an ex-Marxist. This produced one of the few post-1974 works of Horowitz worth reading, his memoir Radical Son (1997). At times, Horowitz can be intimate in recounting his thinking and the various episodes of his life. Yet the reasons for abandoning his former convictions are incredibly hollow and unoriginal. Horowitz comes off as a poor plagiarizer of J. L. Talmon, Whittaker Chambers, and Fyodor Dostoevsky where he bemoans the communist left for rejecting original sin and deifying man’s reason in its place which will inevitably end in terror and totalitarianism.

As a Marxist, Horowitz was no orthodox theorist, but he did make genuine contributions in works such as Free World Colossus. And even his heterodox beliefs were part of a sincere revolutionary commitment against exploitation and oppression. During the sixties, Horowitz’s writing showcased many of the best traits of an engaged Marxist intellectual — insightful, rigorous, accessible, and overtly partisan. While Horowitz’s writings and actions from his later period showcased an equally extreme partisanship, he produced almost nothing of any substance or value. Like many renegades before him, Horowitz travelled the familiar road from radical to reactionary. There was nothing remarkable distinguishing Horowitz’s rightward journey from so many others, except that he turned it into a very lucrative career in defense of the status quo.

Notes

Notes↑1David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 44.↑2David Horowitz, “Left Illusions,” in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, ed. Jamie Glazov (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2003), 102.↑3Horowitz 1997, 84.↑4Jennifer Waters, Michael Kirkpatrick and David Horowitz, “An Interview with David Horowitz,” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art No. 12 (1987): 97-98.↑5David Horowitz, ed., Isaac Deutscher: The Man and His Work (London: Macdonald, 1971), 9 and 14.↑6David Horowitz, Empire and Revolution: A Radical Interpretation of Contemporary History (New York: Random House, 1969), 258.↑7“My Vietnam Lessons,” in Horowitz 2003, 113.↑8David Horowitz, “Marxism and Its Place in Economic Science,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology Vol. 16 (1971-72): 57.↑9David Horowitz, ed., Marx and Modern Economics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), 17.↑10David Horowitz, The Fate of Midas and Other Essays (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, Inc., 1973), 5.↑11Horowitz 1997, 193.↑12Ibid. 287.↑13David Horowitz and Peter Collier, “Goodbye to All That,” Powerline, November 8, 2013. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archive...↑14Alexander Cockburn, The Golden Age is in Us: Journeys and Encounters 1987-1994 (New York: Verso, 1995), 216.

 Originally published by Left Voice.

The Canadian academic Lars Lih is an independent scholar of Soviet history with a particular focus on Lenin and Bolshevism. Lih’s magnum opus Lenin Rediscovered (2005) is a serious study of Lenin’s What is To Be Done? (WITBD), in which he challenged Cold War caricatures of the Bolshevik leader as an elitist bent on totalitarian domination. In this work, Lih proved that Lenin was a dedicated Marxist committed to the emancipation of the working class.

What Was Bolshevism? includes many of Lih’s previously published essays on Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. The nineteen chapters cover a multitude of topics such as war communism, the New Economic Policy, Stalinism, and perestroika. In contrast to Lenin Rediscovered, Lih deemphasizes Lenin and focuses on leading communists such as Trotsky, Bukharin, Stalin, and Zinoviev to understand the meaning of Bolshevism. In erudite and accessible writing, Lih deconstructs longstanding myths on the Left and Right. Still, Lih cannot truly understand Bolshevism since his methodology is marred by textual formalism and an overemphasis on political continuity. 

Bolshevism and Kautskyism

In contrast to the rest of the book, Lih’s introductory chapter centers around Lenin and repeats his previous arguments on WITBD. Following Lenin Rediscovered, he claims both Cold Warriors and leftist activists have largely misunderstood Lenin since they considered WITBD to be the foundational text of Bolshevism. Rather, Lih claims that Bolshevism’s political ideas adhered to the orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky: “I assume the essential continuity of Bolshevism’s message from its beginnings… Much of my writing over the last decade or so has examined the case for the alleged ruptures in 1914 and 1917 and found them wanting.” (p. 4)

Lih argues that WITBD did not advocate a “party of a new type” or a vanguard organization of proletarian revolutionaries. Rather, Lenin’s political ideas followed the model of the German Social Democratic Party as codified by Karl Kautsky’s Erfurt Program: “This book defined Social Democracy for Russian activists – it was the book one read to find out what it meant to be a Social Democrat. In 1894, a young provincial revolutionary named Vladimir Ulianov translated The Erfurt Program into Russian just at the time he was acquiring his life-long identity as a revolutionary Social Democrat.” (p. 45)

Kautsky’s ideal was that social democracy should be the party of the whole class – embracing all tendencies of the working-class movement. The implication of Lenin’s arguments in WITBD was that the party could not be “a party of the whole class.” Due to the uneven nature of consciousness inside the working class, the party should seek to organize its advanced layers. This was not in order to create a conspiratorial organization, but because a disciplined and centralized party of Marxists could act more effectively in the working-class movement than a loose and undisciplined one.

Kautsky believed that the steady accumulation of votes and parliamentary seats by social democracy guaranteed victory, meaning the party did not have to engage in revolutionary action. In effect, history would inevitably go their way. In contrast to Kautsky’s “revolutionary” fatalism, Lenin’s approach was dominated by what Georg Lukács called the “actuality of revolution.” This meant he viewed every action by the party as crucial links in a chain leading to the goal of proletarian revolution. This viewpoint had drastic effects on how Lenin envisioned the role of a communist party. For Lenin, a vanguard party was not a vehicle for collecting votes, nor did it passively await the revolution. While revolution could only happen in certain situations, this did not mean that communists could not prepare for it now. It was imperative for the party to carry out revolutionary agitation in non-revolutionary situations in order to organize forces for when the moment of overturn arrived. 

Lih notes the similarities between Lenin and Kautsky’s language, but he does not see the gulf that separated them in terms of action. German Social Democracy betrayed its socialist commitments in World War I and the German Revolution of 1918. By contrast, the Bolsheviks successfully mobilized the working class against capitalism and the Tsar. In both theory and practice, Bolshevism meant a repudiation of Kautsky’s Erfurtian politics.

If all Lih was doing was highlighting the influence of Kautsky on Lenin, then there would be no objection. Lenin himself recognized his political debt to Kautsky. Yet Lih goes further than that and stresses that there were few, if any, breaks in Lenin’s ideas. It is certainly true that Lenin emerged from within the Second International and used its language and formulations. However, he developed something radically new from that raw material. On a host of ideas ranging from the vanguard party, the state, imperialism, philosophy, and socialist revolution, Lenin’s Bolshevism was vastly different from Kautsky’s “Orthodox Marxism.”

As a result, Lih’s Kautskyization of Lenin transforms Bolshevism from a distinctive revolutionary current into just unoriginal followers of Kautsky and social democracy. In effect, this amounts to a delegitimization of Leninism and its replacement by Kautskyism. By stressing the aspect of continuity over discontinuity in Lenin, Lih cannot comprehend Bolshevism. Lih’s method is one devoid of dialectics, discontinuity, and ruptures. For those interested in a more in-depth discussion on the problems of Lih’s approach, I encourage you to read my The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky which is summarized here.

War Communism 

At least half of Lih’s book is devoted to Bolshevik debates surrounding “war communism.” Following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks were confronted with economic collapse, foreign invasion, and civil war. In response, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Soviet leadership implemented policies to militarize labor and requisition grain from the peasants in order to feed the army. These policies were known as “war communism.” Lih challenges the consensus on war communism from scholars such as Moshe Lewin, Isaac Deutscher, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Orlando Figes, and Martin Malia that see these policies as a deluded fantasy where the Bolsheviks genuinely believed they were entering communism itself: “The myth of a leap into communism, of euphoria-induced hallucination, of a ‘short-cut to communism’, of glorification of coercion as the royal road to communism, etc., is still dominant in most works that reach the larger reading public.” (p. 7)

Leon Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920) is generally singled out as the emblematic Bolshevik text embodying the utopian hopes about war communism. In a chapter devoted to Terrorism and Communism (originally published in 2007), Lih performs a valuable service by noting that Trotsky did not believe these fantasies. Rather, the coercive policies advanced in Terrorism and Communism were not meant to presage communism but were emergency measures to deal with societal collapse: “We find in Trotsky’s speeches of 1920 innumerable variations on two overriding themes. One is the austere ‘blood, sweat and tears’ evocation of the economic ruin facing the country unless extraordinary efforts were made. The other is an insistence on the manifold difficulties created by the breakdown of the capitalist system combined with the primitive, incomplete ‘caricature’ version of socialist institutions set up during the war.” (p. 252)

Lih’s penetrating analysis of Terrorism and Communism stands in stark contrast to Trotsky-sympathetic writers such as Ernest Mandel, Isaac Deutscher, and Tony Cliff. They viewed Terrorism and Communism as Trotsky’s “worst book” which foreshadowed the authoritarian politics of Stalinism. Lih effectively challenges that position by situating Trotsky’s proposals in the concrete circumstances of civil war and as a sensible answer to save the revolution from collapse. For Lih, Trotsky was not a bloodthirsty utopian but was an eminently practical revolutionary leader. 

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek relied upon Lih in his introduction to Verso’s edition of Terrorism and Communism. Žižek views Trotsky largely as an icon of revolutionary hopes, but not as a theorist who can tackle the material conditions of the Russian Civil War or understand the Stalinist Thermidor. Despite his Lacanian verbiage, Žižek’s work benefits immensely from Lih’s historical research. As Harrison Fluss noted in his overview: “Žižek’s intervention is an important one in that he promotes Lih’s reconstruction of Trotsky’s work and at least attempts to rescue Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism from undeserved oblivion. He challenges us to read Trotsky anew, free of stereotypes and clichés.”

Nikolai Bukharin

If there is a central figure in What Was Bolshevism, then it is the Marxist theorist Nikolai Bukharin. As Lih admits, Bukharin plays an oversized role in the revolution and appears in most chapters. Bukharin’s prominence can partly be explained by the influence of Stephen Cohen (Bukharin’s major English language biographer) who was Lih’s personal friend and mentor. For Lih, Bukharin’s place in Bolshevism is analogous to Kautsky in German Social Democracy: “Let me make a comparison that both sides would reject with indignation: Bukharin was the Karl Kautsky of Bolshevism. Just as Kautsky was the authoritative spokesman of revolutionary Social Democracy over several decades, Bukharin played the same role for the post-war heir of revolutionary Social Democracy.” (p. 23)

The overview of Bukharin’s work enables Lih to explain the essentials of the Bolshevik Weltanschauung:

This underlying outlook was based on a narrative about the heroic mission of the proletariat: the proletariat conquered and defended a new state authority in order to be able to build a benevolent mono-organizational society by drawing peasant farms into a unified socialist framework. Civil war and social collapse were close-to-inevitable consequences of proletarian revolution: they imposed high but justifiable costs. After a new equilibrium had been painfully established, society could proceed more smoothly toward a completely organized and planned society. (p. 335)

In several chapters, Lih performs a detailed textual analysis of Bukharin’s major works such as The ABC of Communism (1919) and The Economics and Politics of the Transition Period (1920). Lih believes that Bukharin, like Trotsky, was a practical leader who did not believe war communism was the beginning of a classless society.

Similar to his analysis of Lenin, Lih claims Bukharin maintained a consistent political outlook throughout his life. For example, Lih argues that Bukharin’s views underwent no major changes from war communism to the adoption of a semi-market economy under the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. This reasoning leads Lih to conclude that Bukharin’s gradualist strategy in the 1920s was consistent with his earlier “left communist” views: “All in all, Bukharin’s views support an interpretation of war communism and NEP that puts much greater emphasis on the continuity in the Bolshevik outlook during these two periods.” (p. 337)

Moreover, Lih claims Bukharin’s pro-NEP political strategy did not imply an embrace of market socialism but was a viable path to communism: “I take Bukharin seriously when he insists that the NEP was neither a retreat nor a cause for serious rethinking but a strategy that was genuinely meant to overcome the market.” (p. 336) While Lih is correct that Bukharin did not advocate utopian delusions during war communism, his views did drastically shift with the adoption of the NEP. By stressing continuity, Lih cannot appreciate the development and changes in Bukharin’s positions.

During the 1920s, Bukharin, alongside Stalin, was a major champion of the NEP and market mechanisms against Trotsky and the Left Opposition. What stands out with Bukharin was that he advocated a serious approach to deal with real problems. The weakness in his strategy was the assumption that capitalist economics in the Soviet countryside could gradually and painlessly “grow” into socialist relations. As a result, Bukharin did not see the growing class polarization in the countryside and the breakdown of the NEP at the end of the 1920s.

If Bukharin’s line had somehow prevailed, then the USSR would likely have possessed a thin veneer of “socialism” while being largely governed by capitalist social relations — he would have ended up as the Soviet Deng Xiaoping. While this cannot be proven definitively since his line was defeated, Stephen Cohen has noted that market reformers in the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe echoed Bukharin’s arguments, programs, philosophies, and theories. Even Lih observed that the celebration of the NEP during perestroika signified the restoration of capitalism: “With the detachment of hindsight, we can see that the perestroika reformers found NEP attractive, not as a pathway toward the mono-organizational society, as Bukharin did, but rather away from it.” (p. 30)

Lih’s focus on continuity also means he glosses over changes in Bukharin’s philosophy. In the 1930s, when Bukharin was under arrest and awaiting trial, he wrote The Philosophical Arabesques. As a work of Marxist philosophy, Bukharin’s book ranks alongside Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason and Engels’s Anti-Dühring. Throughout this work, Bukharin strikes back against the Stalinist vulgarization of dialectical materialism and dismissal of Hegel. Bukharin returned to first principles by defending Hegel, Spinoza, and monism. Yet Lih admits in the book Cataclysm 1914 that Hegel and philosophical questions are “outside my competence.” (p. 389) This means he cannot recognize the philosophical stakes in Bukharin’s work.

Lih’s fixation on surface appearances means he cannot appreciate Bukharin’s Aesopian approach. He minimizes the fact that Bukharin was Stalin’s prisoner and a dead man on leave. In order to save his work for posterity, Bukharin was forced to write in code by praising Stalin. As Helena Sheehan notes in her introduction to The Philosophical Arabesques, Bukharin was speaking in code to future generations: “As other commentators have suggested, his trial testimony, as well as his prison manuscripts, must be read as a coded attempt to communicate covertly something sometimes utterly at odds with what he was asserting overtly.” (The Philosophical Arabesques, p. 24) Instead, Lih takes the praise of Stalin in Bukharin’s prison writings at face value: “I myself belong to the Horton school of Bukharin interpretation: like the Dr Seuss character of that name, Bukharin by and large meant what he said and said what he meant. I do not mean to apply this to every last bit of Stalin flattery, but I do think Bukharin had persuaded himself that, despite inevitable difficulties, Stalin’s Russia was on the high road to socialism.” (p. 400)

The Aesopian language in Bukharin’s prison writings served another purpose as well. As a committed antifascist, Bukharin considered his work to be theoretical weapons for the USSR in the struggle against Nazi Germany and fascist irrationalism. In private correspondence with Stalin, he begged the General Secretary to publish his writings, even if his name was removed: “I wrote [the prison manuscripts] mostly at night, literally wrenching them from my heart. I fervently beg you not to let this work disappear… Don’t let this work, perish… This is completely apart from my personal fate.” (The Philosophical Arabesques, p. 16)

While Bukharin was sincere in his support of socialism and the USSR, he did not extend that to Stalin. At his 1938 trial, Bukharin used coded language to turn the tables on his prosecutors and speak to the larger court of world history. In her memoirs, his widow Anna Larina noted that Bukharin defied Stalin at his trial while maintaining his belief in Soviet socialism: “But the most amazing thing is that, despite everything, the time of shining hopes had not passed for him. He would pay for these hopes with his head. Moreover, one reason for his preposterous confessions in the dock—incomplete, but sufficiently egregious confessions—was precisely this: he still hoped that the idea to which he had dedicated his life would triumph.” (This I Cannot Forget, p. 305) By contrast, Lih is unable to disentangle the differing meanings of socialism and Stalin in Bukharin’s works.

If we were to follow Lih’s “Horton school” on Bukharin’s show trial, then we would end up accepting his confessions to fantastic crimes as genuine. Lih never quite goes this far and does acknowledge Bukharin’s resistance: “It is likely that the full meaning of this duel must be sought in the long-standing and highly intense personal relations between Stalin and Bukharin. For our purposes, we should note that Bukharin’s resistance was partly a struggle against the genre of classical melodrama that Stalin wished to impose on him.” (p. 453) Yet the implicit logic of the “Horton school” can easily find itself justifying a Stalinist narrative.

Continuity and Discontinuity

There is undoubted value in Lih’s work in providing a textual exegesis to the writings of Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and other Bolsheviks. He is more than capable of unearthing documents and 

then comparing them to find a common language and continuity. Yet this textual methodology also possesses severe limits. Lih thinks it is sufficient to look at one’s ideas and how they are presented instead of looking at their actual practice and distinctiveness. Lih’s formalism means he sees practice as almost a dirty activity and not worthy of attention. 

By prioritizing continuity, Lih cannot grasp the true breaks that occur in political life.
Throughout the book, he privileges continuity in Bolshevism which is further extended backward to Kautsky and then forward to Bukharin, Zinoviev, and others. The shared Kautskyist heritage of Bolshevism explains Lih’s softness on Stalin, who had a very mechanical and stagist view of Marxism similar to Kautsky’s. Thus, Lih sees Stalin as part of a common Kautskyist-Bolshevik family and a true believer in world revolution: “Stalin was not hypocritical in his support for world revolution, since from his point of view no sacrifice of state interests was involved. His caution about revolutionary prospects in particular cases did not mean he dismissed all revolutionary prospects for the foreseeable future.” (p. 365)

Since he believes there are no fundamental differences between Bolshevism and Stalinism, Lih can easily include texts from the latter as answering the book’s central questions. For example, he observes that Stalin’s 1938 Short Course possessed a strident defense of the Bolshevik party line: “The real hero of the Short Course is the Bolshevik party line. The party line, based solidly on a knowledge of the laws of history, is forced to fight against innumerable critics and scoffers from right and left and goes on from triumph to triumph – this is the narrative of the Short Course.” (p. 517)

Stalin could certainly use the appropriate Marxist language when needed. For that matter, so could Kautsky. Superficially, it could be claimed that Stalinists and social democrats were Marxists due to their slogans and party membership. However, their words and actions represented a clear break from Bolshevism. In order to understand Bolshevism, it is necessary to do more than accept slogans at face value.

Lih claims not to provide his “own answer” to the meaning of Bolshevism, but this is inaccurate. He stresses the “underlying continuity and a gradual metamorphosis” (p. 1) of Bolshevism throughout its history — a relatively seamless transition going from Kautsky to Lenin to Bukharin to Stalin. Ultimately, by seeing just the continuity and not the breaks between Kautskyism, Bolshevism, and Stalinism, Lih misses the main and overarching points.

Lars T. Lih,  What Was Bolshevism?  (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024), 582 pages. $45.

 

This talk was originally delivered to the Greater Boston Humanists on July 24, 2022 and later published in the journal Socialism and Democracy .

It is easy to imagine many atheists, particularly NewAtheists like Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens, dancing with joy at the deathof God. However, one would be hard-pressed to picture Michael Harrington doingthe same. Rather, his eulogy would be one of mourning, where the loss of God leftbehind a society bereft of both meaning and moral purpose. While an atheist formost of his life, Harrington had a complicated relationship with religion.Brought up as a devout Catholic and receiving a Jesuit education, he enduredmany crises of faith before finally leaving the Church as a young man. Despitehis open rejection of God, Harrington never quite left the embrace of religion.He did not regret his youthful beliefs, but looked back fondly upon them. Areligious tone could be found in Harrington’s writings, especially hisacclaimed work The Other America. The foremost democratic socialist ofhis era, Michael Harrington also hoped to make room inside of Marxism for faithand spirituality. Lastly, he envisioned a united front of the godless and thegod-fearing as the only possibility for creating a new world free fromcapitalist amorality and decadence.

A Jesuit Believer

Michael Harrington’s views on religion cannot be separated from his IrishAmerican and Catholic upbringing. He was born on February 28, 1928, to arelatively well-off Catholic family in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, EdwardMichael Harrington was a World War One veteran and a lawyer, specializing inpatent law. Catherine Fitzgibbon, his mother, was a former schoolteacher and anactive volunteer with the Catholic Church.

While Irish American communities in Boston and New York often fiercelyidentified with the distant Irish homeland, the St. Louis one was far moreassimilated. As Harrington later recalled, his parents “did not partake of thatsuffering, angry identity eight centuries of British savagery had imposed uponthe Irish people. We were Americans.” Despite their integrationinto American society, the Harringtons like many Irish Americans, remaineddevout Catholics.

After all, this was still an era when the Catholic Church was viewed withsuspicion in largely-Protestant dominated America. Until the election ofPresident John F. Kennedy in 1960, Catholics were widely considered to be moreloyal to the Papacy than to the Constitution. In addition, the United Stateswas the heartland of capitalism where, as Karl Marx said, the “holy isprofaned” and old traditional values were undermined by the relentless march ofmodernity. In this environment, the Catholic Church hoped to shield its flockfrom godlessness, hedonism, and decadence. As we shall see, Harringtoninternalized these Catholic worries.

In the advance guard of the Catholic Church’s war was the Jesuit Order, whomilitantly defended the faith against any secular challenge. In St. Louis, theJesuits were practically omnipresent, having founded a university, medicalschool, along with other educational and charitable institutions. Thegod-fearing Harringtons wanted to make sure that their son received a qualityJesuit education. The reasons were not just simple devotion, but also becausethe alumni of Jesuit schools formed a network among the St. Louis elite. Theyoung Michael would not only receive a rigorous education to fortify his faith,but hopefully secure his financial future as well.

During his time at school, Harrington received top marks and was active inextra-circular activities. He absorbed the lessons of the Jesuits that “ideashave consequences, that philosophy is the record of an ongoing debate over themost important issues before mankind.” Lateron, he recalled that for the Jesuits, their “heroic period was long since dead.But something of the spirit of being shock troops of Christ on the perimetersof the faith still persisted.”

Upon graduating high school in 1944, Harrington found to his disappointmentthat he was too young to enlist in the army. Instead, he continued his Jesuit educationat Holy Cross College in Massachusetts. Once again, he excelled at his studies andultimately graduated second in his class. The political atmosphere at HolyCross was charged with a fervent anticommunism in celebration of Spanishdictator Francisco Franco and support for the House Committee on Un-AmericanActivities (HUAC) in rooting out subversion. Harrington shared this generalanticommunism, but his social ideas were shaped by Pope Leo XIII’s condemnationof unbridled capitalism made in the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.

To please his father, who wanted his son to become a lawyer, Harringtonattended Yale Law School in 1948. At this time, Yale was a bastion ofliberalism and even shades further to the left. Harrington took interest inthese ideas, but stubbornly maintained his faith. Finding that he had littleinterest in the practice of law, Harrington decided to become a writer. He spenthis weekends traveling to New York City and discovering the Bohemian scene. Topursue his interest in writing, Harrington transferred to the University ofChicago’s graduate program for English literature. Chicago’s politicalatmosphere was filled with lively debates between communists, Trotskyists, andliberals. Harrington excitedly soaked all this up this. Like in New York, healso enjoyed Chicago’s Bohemian milieu. He recalled nostalgically: “we were, tobe sure, pampered rebels. Some of us received allowances from home thatprovided us with the material security to disdain the middle class. But whatmade us something more than just privileged and posturing youths having a flingon the edge of society was that we were really serious, even passionate, aboutideas for their own sake.” While Harrington admittedthat there was an element of superficiality to Bohemia, he said that “ourphoniness had high standards. We postured about the first rate, about Proustand Joyce and Kafka, the later Beethoven quartets and Balanchine choreography,Marx and Lenin. So there was always the possibility that the sophisticated inanitiescould become serious and substantial, that one would hear or say a truth oreven be incited to create. The proof is in the production.” For him, Chicago’s Bohemiawas a center of misfit cultural aristocrats, but he looked differently at the later1960s counterculture. To him, the counterculture was a radical departure sinceit was a mass movement with self-indulgent tendencies. As we will see, not only didthis cultural elitism never leave Harrington, but it informed his laterwritings on capitalism.

In Chicago, Harrington also had his first major crisis of faith. He found thathe no longer accepted that people could be condemned to hell, no matter what theoffense. Since the Jesuit worldview was an integral one where each part wasindispensable, this meant his faith collapsed in one blow. When Harringtongraduated with an MA in 1949, he was not sure what to do with his future. Aftera brief stint at home working as a social worker, he encountered poverty and itwas a moment of conversion for him like Paul on the Road to Damascus. He wasnow determined to fight and eliminate poverty but had no idea how to do so.

Moving to New York City, he worked a series of odd jobs and frequented theliterary avant-garde in Greenwich Village. His spiritual crisis endured untilFebruary 1951. Accepting Pascal’s wager, Harrington decided to return to theChurch:

Butthen, after two years of indecisive apostasy, I read myself back into theChurch. Both of my mentors in that reconversion were the authors of forbidden books,Blaise Pascal and Søren Kierkegaard. One night while reading the Penséesafter a long immersion in Kierkegaard, I decided in a most unjesuitical fashionto return to Catholicism. I no longer felt that I could prove my faith, but nowI was willing to make a wager, a doubting and even desperate wager, on it: Credoquia absurdam. I believe because it is absurd.

Catholic Worker

Harrington wanted to truly live his faith. To that end, he joined the CatholicWorker Movement, which was active in New York City. Founded by Dorothy Day in1933, the Catholic Worker was as far left that one could go in the Church. TheCatholic Worker Movement was guided by the principles of hospitality, socialjustice, and pacifism. Members took a vow of poverty and administered to thepoor. Harrington worked in the soup kitchens and wrote for the CatholicWorker on many subjects that included poverty in America. At last,Harrington felt he was living his faith. As he wrote in a letter to a friend:“this catholicism is sensational. have become insufferably religious...and havefound it wonderful.”

However, Harrington did not quite live up to the Catholic Worker’s credo ofvoluntary poverty. As he said later: “I happen to like nice food, goodwine...and I’ve never made any secret of it.” In addition, he had severalhundred dollars saved up from his other jobs and could rely on his parents forfunds if he needed to. After a few months, Harrington found that could nolonger abstain from alcohol. In addition, he was a reserve member of the armedforces which he could not square with the pacifism of the Catholic Worker. Tohis credit, Harrington refused to fight in Korea and was, through either divineintervention or just sheer luck, not tossed into prison but received an honorabledischarge.

A talented organizer, Harrington met Dwight MacDonald, an anticommunist leftistwho was the founder of the journal Partisan Review. Their relationshipwould later prove beneficial to Harrington since it was Macdonald’s review of TheOther America in the pages of The New Yorker that helped propel himto celebrity status. Through Macdonald, Harrington entered the elite world ofthe New York Intellectuals “who, in keeping with Bohemian tradition, rose upagainst the new philistines of the [Communist Party] in the name of high standards.” Harrington found himselfquite at home among these cultural Mandarins. Furthermore, he also debated the conservativeintellectual and fellow Catholic, William F. Buckley, who was impressed by theyoung Harrington. The two would maintain a decades-long adversarial, but alsofriendly relationship.

As Harrington reached beyond the confines of the Catholic Worker, he foundhimself questioning their political impact. He noted that the Catholic Worker“does not have a mass base – either among the workers or the middle class...Letus plead guilty for having sometimes been arrogant toward the immediate needsof the worker. Let us plead guilty for having lost an orientation toward theworking class. Let us plead guilty for having been uncompromising in a hostilefashion that alienated many. And I am quite serious. We are guilty of these.” While the Catholic WorkerMovement seemed content with their positions, Harrington was eager to break outof political isolation. By early 1952, he was reading Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, andBrecht. His encounter with Marxism brought him into conflict with Day. In aseries of verbal jousts, the two argued over the merits of socialism. Day hopedto win the wayward Harrington away from godlessness. However, his exit was notlong in coming. At a protest, Michael met Bogdan Denitch, a member of the YoungPeople’s Socialist League (YPSL). After devouring YPSL literature, he eagerlytook out a red card to the horror of Day. Harrington’s decision to join YPSLeffectively ended his Pascalian wager on God. In December 1952, Harringtonadmitted: “I no longer believed in the faith, not even by way of an existentialleap.”

The Atheist Crusader

After his break with Catholicism, Michael Harrington would distinguish himselfas a political activist and a public intellectual. He was both a member andleader of the following socialist organizations: The Socialist Party ofAmerica, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), and theDemocratic Socialists of America (DSA). In fact, he founded the last two. Harringtonwas also the author of more than a dozen books on subjects ranging frompolitics, the Third World, and socialist theory. In one sense, Harrington neverlooked back. He remained an atheist for the remainder of his life. Yet he alsofelt deep melancholy for the Church and considered himself to be culturallyCatholic. Reflecting on this in his final years: “I was never one of thosemilitant ex-Catholics who had to kill their one time God over and over, since Ifound the Church, in its highest expressions, profound and beautiful. My onlyproblem was that I did not believe in any of it.”

Indeed, his Jesuit education and cultural Catholicism was visible in Harrington’swriting, particularly The Other America (1962), his famous work on povertythat helped inspire the Great Society of the 1960s. In the book’sacknowledgements, Harrington specifically thanks Dorothy Day and the CatholicWorker Movement. He believed that his time with the Catholic Worker wasinvaluable since it allowed him to be an “American Dickens” who couldunderstand the experience of poverty.

While The Other America is filled with moral indignation at poverty,Harrington does not moralize to the poor. Unlike conservatives, he does notblame the poor for their wretched conditions. Instead, Harrington condemned asimmoral the larger social structures that created and maintained poverty: “Onemight translate these facts into the moralistic language so dear to those whowould condemn the poor for their faults. The other Americans are those who liveat a level of life beneath moral choice, who are so submerged in their povertythat one cannot begin to talk about free choice. The point is not to make themwards of the state. Rather, society must help them before they can helpthemselves.”Harrington argued that neither local government nor private charity, no matterhow well-intentioned, could overcome poverty. Rather, the federal governmentwas the only institution with the resources to undertake this momentous task:“And indeed, even if there were alternate choices, Washington would have toplay an important role, if only because of the need for a comprehensive programand for national planning. But in any case there is no argument, for there isonly one realistic possibility: only the Federal Government has the power toabolish poverty.” Like a good Catholic,Harrington demanded good works. Yet now he did not pray to God for deliverance,but hoped to stir the conscience of good liberals who would finally fulfill theexalted promises of the New Deal: “In any case, and from any point of view, themoral obligation is plain: there must be a crusade against this poverty in ourmidst.” While a secular text, TheOther America speaks in a moralistic tone that any believer would findcomforting.

Democratic Marxism: Spiritual Materialism andthe Pascalian Wager

When it comes to the “notorious” atheist and founder of scientific socialism KarlMarx, Harrington had no qualms about calling himself a Marxist. On the 100thanniversary of Marx’s death, he wrote an article in commemoration. Harringtonplainly said:

But whenall this is said, Karl Marx is the greatest socialist thinker who ever lived, aman deeply committed to freedom, the author and practitioner of a profound andself-critical method. I defend him, I honor and identify with him. His way oflooking at reality is not perfection, but it is the best we have, the best weare likely ever to have. On the second centenary of his death, may articleslike this be utterly unnecessary.

Yet a word of caution is in order here since Harrington canonly be described as a Marxist with the greatest reserve. When it comes to thecore tenets of revolutionary Marxism such as dialectical materialism, nationalliberation, the dictatorship of the proletariat, international workers’solidarity, anti-imperialism, the vanguard party, and communism – all withoutexception are expunged from Harrington’s own “Democratic Marxism.”

In his own reconstruction of Marxism, he rejects the materialist weltanschauungthat lies at its heart. Harrington argues that the idea of an all-encompassingworldview and philosophy is a distortion and misreading of Marx. Rather, hebelieves that this is a trait of “vulgar” Marxism. According to Harrington,“vulgar” Marxism possesses a simplistic model where theeconomic base determines the superstructure and there are iron laws of history.He argues that this “vulgar” Marxism has been the dominant current in both thesocialist and communist movements. Harrington lays the blame for this misreadingsquarely at the feet of Marx’s life-long collaborator, Friedrich Engels:

Engels did much more consistent harm to hismentor’s theory although he sometimes was its shrewdest interpreter. He was theinventor of an omniscient theory of society and nature, called dialecticalmaterialism, which is not to be found, even as a momentary indiscretion, in thewritings of Marx.

By codifying dialectical materialism and drawing upon the work of Hegel, Harringtonbelieved that Engels created a determinist worldview and a quasi-religion thatpromised the inevitable victory of socialism. Harrington claimed that thisMarxist weltanschauung was first put into practice by Lenin, andproduced disastrous consequences under Stalin:

 

...Leninhimself was the proponent of an integralist brand of Marxism, borrowed inconsiderable measure from Engels, which was to provide the anti-theology forStalin’s atheist church...Lenin was an activist, the organizer of an undergroundparty of committed revolutionaries rather than a mass electoral party like thatof the German socialists. Under such circumstances, the party’s ideology had tobe an all-consuming faith which would provide the cadres with a reason to risktheir freedom and their lives...

Leninproceeded to make a supreme virtue out of this alleged necessity – andunintentionally to prepare the way for a state cult of atheism under Stalinwhich would be every bit as orthodox as the Orthodox Church he wanted tosmash... The Party’s infallibility was no longer an opinion; it was a dogmaenforced by the secret police.

In place of this “pseudo-Marxism” with its “crass, sordidmaterialism,” Harrington advances an alternative theory of “spiritualmaterialism.” As opposed to Marxist determinism and monism, Harrington arguesthat spiritual materialism takes into account the spiritual side of people bygiving the utmost attention to the active roles of ideas, culture, andconsciousness.

While Harrington denies that he is championing a Kantian socialism, inactuality, this is precisely what spiritual materialism amounts to. By rejecting monism anddialectics to make room for faith, he removes material necessity from Marxismand makes socialism into a Kantian moral imperative. Harrington is in good – orrather bad – company in his endeavor to jettison Hegel for Kant. Revisionistsin the Marxist movement whether in German or Austrian Social-Democracy alsoreplaced Hegel with Kant. The father of revisionism in Germany, Eduard Bernsteinrecognized that the Hegelian dialectic lay behind Marx’s theory of proletarianrevolution. In 1898, he wrote: “In Germany, Marx and Engels, working on thebasis of the radical Hegelian dialectic, arrived at a doctrine very similar toBlanquism.”Here, Blanquism serves as a scare word to denote communist revolution. In placeof Hegel, Bernstein invoked Kant: “Social Democracy needs a Kant to judge thereceived judgment and subject it to the most trenchant criticism....” The efforts of bothBernstein and Harrington led to similar results. By removing Hegel,revolutionary dialectics, and “sordid materialism” from Marxism, they both maderoom not for the “spiritual” or morality, but support for nationalism andimperialism. Rather than improving Marxism, these efforts gutted it as arevolutionary philosophy. As the Hungarian Communist Georg Lukács noted, adefense of Marxism from revisionism entailed at the same time the defense ofHegel: “For anyone wishing to return to the revolutionary traditions of Marxismthe revival of the Hegelian traditions was obligatory.”

In contrast to “spiritual materialists” like Harrington, orthodox Marxistsclaim that the world is governed by causal relations and that theinterconnections of social and natural phenomena are determined. Only a materialistworldview can provide an understanding of these laws. Based upon thisknowledge, Marxists argue that capitalism contains internal contradictions thatlead it to crisis and breakdown. In other words, there is a material necessityto the workers’ struggle for communism. Yet Harrington’s revisionist Marxismprovides no insight into the operations of capitalism or how to reachsocialism. As he openly admits, spiritual materialism is not a scientifictheory: “As a tool of social and economic analysis, the concept of man as aspiritual materialist is almost empty of meaning.” Instead, Harrington saysthat spiritual materialism offers only “some very broad and basic guidelines.” Whereas Marxists attempt toreconcile theory and practice into an integral whole, spiritual materialismcannot. In fact, spiritual materialism welcomes an inconsistency between theoryand practice. Instead of basing its political practice on knowing the world,this leads Harrington’s “Democratic Marxism” to rely upon faith in the form ofa Pascalian wager.

Harrington claimed that Marxism contained its own Pascalian wager:

And yet,as Lucien Goldman pointed out, there is a Marxist “wager,” in thePascalian-sense of the word. It is, however, a wager, not on a distant God or aprovidence, but upon the ability of men and women to create a future whosebasic principles will be, not supernatural or outside of history, butsupra-individual. Humans would not discover a substitute for God but, rather,in living up to their own potential for the first time in history, they wouldfind out that there was no need for God.

Since Harrington could not use Marxist materialism to guidehis ideas, he used leaps of faith. When he left the Socialist Party in theearly 1970s after many years, he experienced this as a political crisis. He wasleft adrift with only a few comrades alongside him and the future for socialismlooked bleak. Like his earlier spiritual crisis, Harrington wondered if heshould continue as a socialist. To justify going forward, he again made aPascalian wager. Unlike before, he did not bet on God, but on democratic socialism:

That ishow the revolution goes forward sometimes, in such ridiculous settings,sometimes just a few people. The transformations of this century are not merelya matter of historic events; there is no day on which history will leap fromnecessity to freedom. There is rather a molecular process, composed of millionsand even billions of personal decisions, whereby men and women assert their willand take control of their own destiny...But if we do not begin, who will?

I do notromanticize, even though there is now a Pascalian cast to my Marxism. I amexcruciatingly aware of the socialist failures of the past and of our woefulinadequacies in the present. But precisely because the social classes wearingtheir economic masks did not act as they were supposed to and the struggletherefore became the more complex and ambiguous than Marx ever imagined, theindividual decision has become more important. That is not to say that thesocialist ideal is merely a matter of private wish. Socialism is today thedream of the majority of mankind... And yet, after more than a century, it isstill beginning, a task to be accomplished, not a destiny to be awaited.

In the end, Harrington’s argument for socialism does not comefrom knowledge of historical laws, but a leap of faith. “Spiritual materialism”precludes by design any effort to understand the world. Nor does it serve as aguide to practice. Under the banner of Kantian “faith,” Harrington can doeverything from championing anticommunism, supporting the Democratic Party, andwhitewashing imperialism. The eclectic and opportunistic nature of “DemocraticMarxism” takes Harrington away from materialism, reason, and socialism as well.

God’s Funeral

Even after becoming an atheist and socialist, Harrington held fast to many ofthe same concerns as the Jesuits about the modern world and moral decline. Theseideas were first coherently expressed in his 1965 book, The AccidentalCentury. Harrington said that in the twentieth century “the chasm betweentechnological capacity and economic, political, social, and religiousconsciousness - the accidental revolution ... has unsettled every faith andcreed in the West.” He argued that whilecapitalism had greatly expanded the productive powers at the hands of humanity,it had also brought with it a “cold decadence” and moral decay among thepeople. Unlike the Jesuits, Harrington blamed capitalism for this spiritual crisis:“the civilization of capitalism, its ethics, its morality, its philosophy, wasbeing destroyed by the practice of capitalism.” In terms reminiscent ofTheodor Adorno and Friedrich Nietzsche, he also deplored the massificationproduced by the culture industry in television, movies, and the radio fordestroying art:

Thecommodities of the new cultural assembly line flooded the society. Serious artfled to the margin, folk art was all but abolished in the city, an entire wayof life became committed to machine-tooled mediocrity.

Harrington argued that contemporary capitalism was dominatedby “anonymous collectivities” such as corporations which erased humanindividuality. In contrast to conservatives, who hoped to return to apre-capitalist past of “happy hierarchies” and a “City of God,” Harrington knewthat there was no going back. He believed that the advance of modernity wasirreversible. This meant that traditional religion had lost its former powerand glory:

Religionhas lost the discipline, solidarity, and awe of primitive hunger. Short ofnuclear catastrophe, it will probably never againbuild upon such necessities, and in a technological time it cannot possiblyconstruct itself as a mystery cult. The inexplicable natural events which Godonce made supernaturally reasonable are now scientifically explicable.

For Harrington, the only salvationfor humanity from capitalism’s “gentle apocalypse” lay in a democraticsocialist future.

Many of these themes were explored again and expanded upon in what is perhapsHarrington’s best work, ThePolitics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization (1983). Here, heargues that throughout most of history, it was religion thatprovided a comprehensive understanding of the world, the foundation of humanmorality, and a sense of community and identity. However, the development ofcapitalism, secularization, and the French Revolution had all acted toundermine religious faith. Harrington argued in terms that were reminiscent of RerumNovarum that capitalism had created “the first agnostic economic-socialformation in the history of the West” He did not blame justsecular ideas for the spiritual vacuum of capitalism, but argued thatProtestant theology unwittingly served as a legitimizing ideology for the newbourgeoisie: “Protestantism and capitalism were reciprocally interacting causesand effects in a gigantic social transformation.”

Harrington observed that the rise of capitalism undid the traditional socialfabric, but left nothing to take its place. As a result, people searched for a“substitute deity to take over the social functions of the dying God oftradition.”Throughout The Politics at God’s Funeral, Harrington explores many ofthese replacements for God, which include nationalism, Freudian psychoanalysis,Nietzschean philosophy, Marxism, and fascism.

One of the central arguments of both The Accidental Century and ThePolitics at God’s Funeral was that the spiritual crisis following the deathof God was part of a wider societal crisis of capitalism. While religion was atlost to deal with modernity, Harrington argued that the wider Enlightenmentcould not provide answers either. As he said:

 

Has thiscrisis of capitalist legitimacy been a victory for the anti-capitalists? Not quite,for they were heirs of the Enlightenment, too. The Enlightenment was, like theFrench Revolution it inspired, a contradiction in terms, a genuine appeal touniversal values but committed to a particular, class-dominated social order.It was utopian in that it sincerely believed in reason and humanity’s abilityto create a just society; it was apologetic, ideological, because it alsodespised the mob and looked for consoling myths with which to keep it quiet.

Yet Harrington did not despair. He believed that both seriousatheists and religious believers not only recognized this crisis, but theyshared a common enemy in an alienated and amoral capitalist order. Therefore,an alliance between the two camps was possible. While Harrington said that Marxismbest provided a coherent understanding to the modern world, he argued that its weltanschauungwas insufficient to build a new majority for change since “such theoreticalcommitment narrowed the movement by excluding many.” He believed that socialistorganizations should not take positions on spiritual or philosophicalquestions. In fact, Harrington was glad that many socialist parties abandoned astrict adherence to Marxism. He considered this development encouraging sinceit “has opened these [socialist] movements up to currents, most emphaticallyincluding religious currents, which they once excluded on principle.”

This is not to say that Marxism had no place in Harrington’s united front. Inline with spiritual materialism, he argued that Democratic Marxism will mobilizethe power of morality and values that go beyond crude material interest.Harrington believes that this new majority for democratic socialism “would haveto be united on the basis of ethical values and not simply in terms of the materialinterests of a single class.” By leaving aside a proletarianclass stand and uniting around a moral anticapitalism, atheists would be ableto join forces with religious believers, since they were both speaking aboutthe same underlying problems of capitalism. As Harrington argued: “seriousatheists and agnostics now share a common cause with serious believers: aconcern for values as such, for a vision of individual and socialmeaningfulness which goes beyond the latest consumer or cultural fad.”

One can see this type of united front at work in Harrington’s own politicallife. For one, he was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement.Harrington considered this movement to be a great crusade where black and whitewere joined together in a common cause for justice. As he observed, the CivilRights Movement “was permeated by Judeo-Christian values, even if some of thosewho acted upon them were atheistic humanists.” Thesocialist organizations that Harrington was a member of embodied a similar “bigtent” approach to believers. For instance, the leader of the Socialist Partywho preceded Harrington was the Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas. InHarrington’s own Democratic Socialists of America, its ranks includedChristians, Jews, and Muslims alongside atheists. Among the most prominentmembers of DSA is Cornel West, who is a Christian philosopher. Finally, a unitedfront of atheists and the religious went in hand-in-glove with his largerpolitical strategy for building a new majority of progressives, socialists, andliberals that would realign the Democratic Party.

While Harrington argued that religion could no longer provide the core valuesof modern society, that did not mean a future democratic socialism would bevalue-free or agnostic. He fervently believed that there was still a need for“transcendentals.” When talking about ademocratic socialist society, Harrington said: “More broadly, post-bourgeoissociety will resemble pre-bourgeois society in a way which will make ideology -visions of the world, values, culture - more politically and socially importantthan during the last four hundred years in the West.” On the surface, one can agreewith Harrington that the state is not neutral in its philosophy. Politicscannot be divorced from belief since ideas do matter. The state must maintainsome sort of guiding doctrine or philosophy to justify its actions. Thoseguiding ideas must be propagated and disseminated as a form of civic education.Yet since freedom of conscience must prevail, acceptance should be done throughpersuasion and education without resorting to coercion. Yet for Marxists, theguiding philosophy of a socialist state must be secular and rational, not basedon the supernatural. While he would deny it, Harrington’s vision of the futurenot-so-subtly hopes that socialism will revive religious dogmatism as itstranscendental philosophy and give a secondary place, at best, to Enlightenmentreason.

Eulogy

Michael Harrington described his own relationship with religion by callinghimself a “pious apostate.” As we have seen, his piety ran very deep. He sharedwith the Church a deeply rooted anticommunism, moral indignation at thedecadence of modernity, and a lament for those left in poverty by capitalism.Harrington sought to find a place for religion and the spiritual within hisconception of Democratic Marxism. While no doubt sincere in its efforts,“spiritual materialism” wound up impoverishing the scientific character ofMarxism and leaving it unable to understand or change the world. Instead, his DemocraticMarxism could only offer a Pascalian wager that wound up justifying bothirrationalism and opportunism. In the end, Harrington’s eulogy at God’s funeralwas stirring and full of passionate anguish, but offered little to eitheratheists or socialists. It was an empty cry.

Endnotes

MichaelHarrington, Fragments of the Century: A Social Autobiography (New York:Saturday Review Press, 1973), 4. In addition, portions of this article aredrawn heavily from Doug Enaa Greene, A Failure of Vision: Michael Harringtonand the Limits of Democratic Socialism (Washington: Zer0 Books, 2021)

Harrington1973, 13.

Ibid. 8-9.

Ibid.36-37.

Ibid. 46.

Ibid. 39.

Ibid.17. Italics in the original.

Quoted inMaurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life of MichaelHarrington (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 80.

Myrna Oliver, “Michael Harrington, Socialist Activist andAuthor, Dies at 61,” Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1989.http://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-0...

Harrington 1973, 65.

Quoted inIsserman 2000, 97-98.

Harrington 1973,25.

MichaelHarrington, The Long-Distance Runner: AnAutobiography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988), 240.

Michael Harrington, The OtherAmerica: Poverty in the United States (Baltimore:Penguin Books, 1962), 24.

Ibid.159.

Ibid.167.

Ibid.163.

Michael Harrington, “Standing Upfor Marx,” Democratic Left Vol. XL, No. 3 (March 1983):4.

Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster,1976), 42.

MichaelHarrington, The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of WesternCivilization (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 51-54.

Ibid. 223.

EduardBernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993), 37.

Ibid.209.

GeorgLukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1971), xxi. Ironically, Harrington himself did the first translationof the opening chapter of HCC into English in 1957.

Harrington1976, 172.

Ibid.

Harrington1983, 80. See also Lucien Goldman, The Hidden God:A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (NewYork: Verso, 2016), 90.

Harrington 1983,108.

Michael Harrington, The AccidentalCentury (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 41.

Ibid. 93.

Ibid. 230.

Ibid. 17.

Harrington 1983,108. See also Jim Farmelant and Mark Lindley, “Six Prominent AmericanFreethinkers,” MR Online, Dec 16, 2008. https://mronline.org/2008/12/16/six-p...

Harrington 1983, 109-110.

Ibid. 18.

Ibid. 30.

Michael Harrington, Socialism: Past and Future (New York: Arcade Publishing,1989), 297.

Harrington 1983, 216.

Harrington 1989,304 and 308. See also Harrington 1983, 212-216.

Harrington1983, 203.

Ibid. 191.

Ibid.199.

Ibid.211.

Thisanalysis draws on the work of Landom Frim, Should the State Teach Ethics? Aschematism (unpublished) and Harrison Fluss, “Revisiting the Cult of theSupreme Being.” Jacobin, January 14,2016. https://jacobinmag.com/2016/01/robesp....

 

Originally published by Firebrand.

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union was wracked by intense violence known as the Great Terror or the Great Purge. During this time, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin initiated a series of public show trials to eliminate his political competition within the Communist Party. 

Under threat of execution, leading Bolsheviks confessed that they were guilty of sabotage, assassination, wrecking, and espionage in league with fascists and the exiled Leon Trotsky to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union. Within the world communist movement aligned with the USSR, these verdicts were accepted as unquestioned articles of faith. Only small groups of dissident Marxists dared to protest. 

After Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s crimes in 1956, and especially after the opening of the Soviet archives in 1991, the old narrative about the trials has largely been discredited. Still, there are those who believe in the old-time religion of the General Secretary.

Amongst the most zealous defenders of the Stalinist liturgy is Grover Furr, a professor of medieval literature at Montclair State University. Over the past several decades, Furr has produced dozens of articles and books claiming that the Soviet courts got it right — that there was a vast “Trotskyite–Fascist” plot to destroy the USSR. Amongst many contemporary “Marxist-Leninists” (Stalinists), Furr is viewed as a leading authority who has exposed lies, falsehoods, and unsubstantiated claims that characterize the study of the Stalin-era Soviet Union.

However, a closer examination of Furr’s work reveals that, as always, he justifies Stalin’s inquisition with crude falsehoods, cherrypicked data, conspiracism, and logical fallacies. 

The case of the vanishing Trotskyite–Fascist conspiracy

Furr’s latest book is Trotsky’s Comintern Conspiracy — The Case of Osip Pyatnitsky. Co-authored with Vladimir Bobrov, this volume focuses on the old Bolshevik and important Comintern official Pyatnitsky (1882–1938). According to Furr, Pyatnitsky conspired with Leon Trotsky and other Bolsheviks to carry out multiple crimes: espionage with the Third Reich, planning the assassination of Soviet leaders, wrecking the Soviet economy, organizing an armed uprising to coincide with a fascist invasion, and sending Comintern funds to Trotsky. 

As Furr and Bobrov claim, “The truth — obvious to anyone who studies the primary sources in a spirit of objectivity — is that these serious conspiracies did indeed exist. We have an enormous amount of evidence from former Soviet archives to prove it.”

Yet Furr cannot substantiate these fantastic charges with physical evidence from the Soviet archives or anywhere else. As he readily admits: “No documentary evidence of collusion with Soviet conspirators, including Leon Trotsky, has been found in the prewar archives of Germany and Japan.”

Yet this does not deter Furr, since he argues that the lack of physical evidence and documentation merely proves how effective the “Trotskyite–Fascist” conspiracy was in covering their tracks: “All vital information would exist only in the minds of the participants. In fact, if such incriminating documents were found, the mere fact of its existence ought to raise suspicion of fakery!”

Knowing that he has no certainties, nor a “smoking gun,” Furr states that there is no such thing as conclusive proof since any evidence can be forged or faked, making it unreliable: “As always in the writing of history our conclusions must be provisional. Historians do not deal in ‘certainties.’ As more evidence comes to light in [the] future, we must be prepared to adjust or even discard our earlier conclusions.” 

Furr’s superficial agnosticism merely distracts from the main issue. He has made specific claims that there was a vast conspiracy composed of Pyatnitsky, Trotsky, and Adolf Hitler that was exposed, and that their key ringleaders in the USSR were executed. 

If foreign powers were funding a “Fascist–Trotskyite” conspiracy, then what would the paper trail realistically look like? Did the conspirators hold their own conferences? Did they have orders? Did anyone write their memoirs? Where are the receipts listing the funds they received to conduct espionage, assassination, and wrecking? No physical proof was provided in the Soviet courts that allegedly verified this vast conspiracy. Nor was anything uncovered in the archives of Germany and Japan. The German authorities were noted for meticulous record keeping, so it is reasonable to assume they would have left proof in the archives. In that case, why didn’t Soviet researchers find any after occupying Germany in 1945? 

For Furr, the lack of proof becomes the best proof possible, with which we can prove the existence of Santa Claus and angels alongside a “Trotskyite–Fascist” conspiracy. 

Inquisition logic

That means the only evidence available to Furr are confessions. In fact, close to half the book is composed of lengthy transcripts of interrogations and confessions from Soviet police archives. He believes that Pyatnitsky freely confessed his guilt and that no torture or physical coercion was employed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, to produce false testimony. Furr says that evidence obtained from torture was inadmissible in Soviet courts: “In a judicial procedure, even in the USSR during Stalin’s time, evidence obtained from a defendant by torture was invalid and could not be validly used.”

This contradicts the evidence we possess from the Soviet archives. The collection Road to Terror, edited by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov and first published in 1999, provides ample details. For example, the NKVD authorized quotas for mass arrests in July 1937. This was part of an official police campaign in which thousands were arrested in an atmosphere of mass hysteria and false denunciations. The suspects had good reason to believe they would not be handled gently by the police.

There were also operational orders for interrogating subjects that included solitary confinement, beatings, and torture. There are further documents with detailed instructions on the punishment and surveillance of families of suspects. Top Soviet leaders such as Vyacheslav Molotov were aware that torture was widely practiced and that innocent people were sentenced to death. While it was true that the defendants at the Moscow Trials were not physically tortured — this would have made the frame-up too obvious — they were still under threat. They lived in a society where torture of suspects was pervasive and families were threatened.

At the same time, Furr claims that even if torture was applied during interrogations that this does not mean those confessions should be considered any less reliable than those for which no physical pressure was applied. He writes in all seriousness, “The fact that a person was beaten is not evidence that he was innocent. Guilty persons can also be beaten.” 

Despite Furr’s claims, documentary proof of frame-ups does cast suspicion on confessions. In the United States, confessions obtained by coercion are routinely thrown out by the courts upon further appeal. Proof of coercion does cast doubt on the whole justice system whether in the United States or the Soviet Union.

This raises another issue about the confessions: their lack of corroborating evidence. For instance, the confession of a suspect to multiple murders is only valid if they can show where the bodies are buried. The claims of the confession are only confirmed by discovering other corroborating evidence. 

In both the Moscow Trials and Furr’s work, no form of corroborating evidence is provided at all. The existence of confessions without corroborating evidence raises the immediate question as to whether the accused were coerced in one way or another to incriminate themselves. 

As Nikolai Bukharin said at his 1938 trial: “The confession of the accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence.” In other words, Furr’s reasoning has more in common with the rationales used to justify the Inquisition’s auto-da-fé or the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

In addition, Furr states that no frame-up was involved because Stalin sincerely believed there was a conspiracy: “Stalin accepted these [NKVD] reports as genuine. Stalin believed that he was taking decisive action against anti-Soviet conspiracies that did indeed pose a serious security threat to the USSR. The evidence available to us today proves that Stalin was correct.” This is the reasoning of George Costanza from Seinfeld: “Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.” 

Just because Stalin believed something did not make it true. People sincerely believe in miracles, horoscopes, and the claims made on Fox News, but that does not make any of them true. Believing in absurdities does not mean one cannot commit crimes or justify frame-ups.

Conspiracies within conspiracies

At the same time, Furr states that NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov was deceiving Stalin and the Soviet leadership with his reports: “We know a great deal about how Yezhov and his men beat false confessions and executed a great many — probably tens of thousands of innocent persons.” 

To recap: on the one hand, Furr says that confessions obtained by the NKVD proved that a “Trotskyite–Fascist” conspiracy was real. On the other hand, he acknowledges that the Soviet security forces under Yezhov engaged in the widespread torture of innocent people. 

Blaming Yezhov for repression in the 1930s enables Furr to absolve Stalin and still defend the Moscow Trials narrative. He claims that from 1936–38, Yezhov carried out mass arrests and conducted torture to obtain false confessions. This was all done at the behest of the “Trotskyite–Fascist” conspiracy to discredit Stalin and the Soviet government: “In the interrogations we have cited above Yezhov also confessed to torturing and framing innocent persons on an enormous scale in order to sow discontent with the Soviet system and thus facilitate the overthrow of the Soviet government and Party leadership in the event of invasion by Japan and/or Germany.”

If one accepts Furr’s reasoning, then at the high point of the Great Terror, the NKVD was carrying out extensive repression. Somehow, the false confessions obtained did not include Pyatnitsky and the defendants at the Moscow Trials. This raises a number of obvious questions. Was Yezhov hiding his cover by unmasking genuine conspiracies? Wouldn’t it defeat the purpose of the “Trotskyite–Fascist” plot for Yezhov to arrest his co-conspirators? If Bukharin and others were betrayed by Yezhov, then why didn’t they identify him as a co-conspirator? 

Furr’s effort to reconcile Yezhov versus Stalin with the narrative of the Moscow Trials has no basis in historical fact. Rather, this resembles medieval astronomers attempting to salvage the Ptolemaic theory that the Earth was the center of the universe even as contrary evidence kept piling up. Eventually, it had to be abandoned for a theory that better fit the data. 

Furr’s attempt to construct conspiracies within conspiracies is built on faulty premises and internal inconsistencies. In the end, his entire narrative of Soviet history cannot be squared with reality.

Sloppy Stalinist pseudoscience

It is worth noting that, as with all of his work, Furr’s book is poorly organized and difficult to follow. Even the index is sloppy, with subjects listed by their first name instead of their last, making it hard to find anything. The first 80 pages — we forgive those who stop reading by this point — does not lay out the main argument of the text. In the opening chapters, Furr discusses a series of historical articles about Pyatnitsky and inundates the reader with an abundance of data.

The structure of the book clearly shows Furr’s pseudo-scholarly method. He does not present a thesis or an abstract, listing his main points and the evidence to support his claims. Since Furr has no coherent evidence at all, he strains to make a case that cannot be made. Instead, he bombards the reader with small facts, stories, and documents for nearly a quarter of the book. He “proves” all sorts of things and takes the reader down many different rabbit holes.

However, the mountain of data does not prove his central argument that Pyatnitsky was involved in a vast conspiracy. Furr’s work is a classic example of pseudoscience. It has the form, language, tone, and footnotes that give the appearance of scholarly rigor. All this serves as filler to overwhelm the reader with seemingly abundant evidence to make them more predisposed to accept Furr’s arguments. Since Furr can’t impress the reader with brilliance, he baffles them with bullshit.

In his approach, Furr is little different from those who attempt to prove 9/11 conspiracy theories, the existence of the Illuminati, or that Jews control the world. Like all pseudoscience, Trotsky’s Comintern Conspiracy is written to deceive. 

Unfortunately, Furr’s approach works with “Marxist-Leninists” who want to believe a false narrative and prefer to live in a bubble where their faith isn’t challenged. For those interested in a critical analysis of Stalinism, I encourage readers to explore my Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn and my forthcoming work, The Prophet Persecuted, which will discuss the conspiracist thinking of Furr and other neo-Stalinists regarding the Moscow Trials.

Yet this does not mean that Furr’s work is completely valueless. Understanding those who, like Furr, get it completely wrong is useful training in critical thinking. It enables one to distinguish a scientific approach to reality from one more akin to the irrationalist and conspiracist methods of creationists, Holocaust deniers, and QAnon. Woe to those leftists who cannot tell the difference.

 

I did an interview with Left Voice devoted to my new book, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge .

On this episode of the podcast, we interview Independent communist historian Doug Greene about his latest book, “Renegade’s Revenge: The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky.” Kautsky was an important theorist of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the largest party in the Second International. He was immensely influential at the height of the Second International, and was recognized as the “Pope of Marxism.” At the time, major socialist figures, including Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and Eugene Debs all looked to Kautsky for guidance and viewed him as an authority on scientific socialism. 

But despite his radical rhetoric, Kautsky’s Marxism was limited, and he proved himself to be a tepid gradualist. At almost every pivotal moment, he stood with the reformists rather than for proletarian revolution. For example, he defended the SPD’s support for German imperialism in World War I, he was staunchly against Bolshevism, and, until the end of his life, he was wedded to bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism. Importantly, every time his ideas were tried, they led to defeat, rather than to socialism. As Greene writes, “Kautsky’s final legacy was in providing a “left” cover for imperialist war and an anti-communist “socialism” made safe for bourgeois liberalism.”

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in interest in Kautsky on the Left. Many U.S. leftists have used Kautsky’s arguments to defend working with the Democratic Party. These leftists embrace the same underlying reformism as Kautsky with, for example, their faith in the institutions of capitalist Democracy. This is why modern reformists are destined to, as Greene explains, “find themselves in the same cul-de-sac as Kautsky himself.” 

This episode, and Greene’s book, are not just about Karl Kautsky the individual, or about the attempted revival of Kautskyism. In the process of refuting Kautskyism, Greene elucidates revolutionary Marxism, showing us that if we’re serious about fighting capitalism, we need to leave Kautsky and his reformist politics in the dustbin of history, while returning to revolutionary socialism.

“The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: Renegade’s Revenge” is available here.

Listen to the episode on Spotify on Apple Podcasts.

Support this podcast on Patreon

Originally published by Firebrand .

In his 1997 text “The Metaphysics of National Bolshevism,” the Russian fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin said the coming together of the political left and right under the banner of national Bolshevism represented the future:

The rule of National Bolshevism, its Regnum and Final Empire, is a complete realization of the greatest Revolution in history, continental and universal. It is the return of angels, the resurrection of heroes, the revolt of the heart against the dictatorship of reason.1

Dugin is perhaps the most articulate spokesperson for the political trend known as national Bolshevism, a syncretic and eclectic political movement that portrays itself as “neither right nor left” by combining ultranationalism and revolutionary communist élan. In the Russian Federation, this tendency is represented today by the National Bolshevik Party (NBP). Formed in 1991 by Eduard Limonov, the NBP hoped to bring together elements of the old Stalinist left and the nationalist right. Currently the NBP is largely moribund, but it did anticipate other efforts to generate “red-brown” alliances. For instance, national Bolshevism can be found among segments of the “anti-imperialist” left in the United States who support Vladimir Putin in his fight against western hegemony. The closest to genuine national Bolsheviks are fringe groups of online trolls known as MAGA “Communists” like Haz Al-Din. Neo-Nazi leader Matthew Heimbach, formerly of the Traditionalist Workers Party, similarly describes himself as a patriotic socialist (“patzi”) and an admirer of Putin. Alt-right leader and white supremacist Richard Spencer has also been a supporter of both Putin and Dugin (though he has shifted since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and is now pro-NATO). However, there are more serious actors who, while not full-blown national Bolsheviks, have nevertheless adopted portions of their “multipolarity” geopolitical approach. Both the Marcyite Workers World Party (WWP) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) support Russia, Iran and other reactionary and oppressive forces simply because they are opposed to American imperialism. Unfortunately, their ideas have influenced a whole section of the American left well beyond their official membership. Dugin and other national Bolsheviks present their ideas as avant-garde, but they actually have a long history dating back over a century. In Germany, figures such as Ernst Niekisch (1889–1967) developed their own brand of national Bolshevism that combined German nationalism with admiration for the Soviet Union. National Bolshevik ideas also resonated with Conservative Revolutionaries like Ernst Jünger and “left” Nazis such as Gregor Strasser and Ernst Röhm.
The first major national-Bolshevik initiative occurred in 1923 when Germany stood on the brink of revolution. In his controversial “Schlageter speech” to the Communist International, Bolshevik leader Karl Radek paid tribute to a martyred Nazi hero, Leo Schlageter, and urged the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) to harness the power of nationalism for the socialist cause. Following Radek’s advice, the KPD utilized anti-semitic and nationalist rhetoric in its propaganda, hoping to win over the petty-bourgeois supporters of fascism. During this brief experiment, the party not only failed to win over the nationalists but created confusion in its own ranks. The experience of the “Schlageter line,” as it came to be known, and other red-brown alliances show that national Bolshevism is a Frankenstein’s monster. Marxist internationalism and anti-oppression politics cannot be combined with reactionary and nationalist elements without fundamentally diluting their emancipatory core. The main lesson of the Schlageter line is that appealing to the far right will never advance the communist cause but only serve to hinder it. To counter the appeal of fascists, Marxists need to be uncompromising revolutionaries who defend their political principles.The Schlageter legendAlbert Leo Schlageter was born in 1894 and was a devoted German nationalist from his early youth. During World War I, he was a decorated soldier who fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the Western front. Radicalized by defeat, Schlageter believed that Germany was now threatened with destruction by the forces of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” To save the fatherland, he joined the paramilitary Freikorps and the Nazi Party. The French occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923 led to a political crisis in Germany. Millions of Germans from all classes perceived the invasion as a national humiliation. Like other nationalists, Schlageter was enraged and felt it was his duty to serve Germany once again. Over the course of several months, he led a group of nationalists in the Ruhr who conducted sabotage operations against the French occupiers. Schlageter was captured by the French and sentenced to death. On May 26, he was executed by a firing squad after receiving final communion from a priest. By now, Schlageter had become a cause célèbre for German nationalists. His corpse was returned home for a final burial accompanied by adoring crowds. The Nazis were quick to take advantage of the outpouring of grief for one of their own. Adolf Hitler sent 70,000 Sturmabteilung (SA, or Stormtroopers) to march alongside the casket, six of whom served as pallbearers.2 In Munich, Hitler spoke before a crowd of 30,000 and paid tribute to Schlageter’s sacrifice for the Volk:

Schlageter’s death should show us that freedom will not be won by protests, but by action alone… when men stand at the helm of Germany who are worthy of such heroism, because they themselves are heroes. And we give this promise today, that we will not rest until the Volk pulsates with the spirit of battle, and until we hear the cry ‘The Volk arises! Let the storm break loose!’3

This was only the beginning of the Schlageter legend.The Nazi martyrFollowing the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, Schlageter became one of the new heroes of the Third Reich. On the tenth anniversary of his death, the Schlageter National Monument was unveiled in Düsseldorf. The monument’s design replicated the cross that stood on Golgotha. Like the Christian savior who rose from the dead to bring salvation, Schlageter had now risen with the new national revolution. Among those in attendance were Hitler and fellow Nazi leader Hermann Göring. At the opening ceremony, Göring addressed the crowd: “Schlageter demonstrated in the way he died that the German spirit could not be destroyed… As long as there are Schlageters in Germany, the nation will live.”4 At the conclusion of the event, the people of Düsseldorf presented Hitler with a silver shrine that supposedly contained the bullet that killed Schlageter. The philosopher and newly minted Nazi party member Martin Heidegger also hailed Schlageter’s nationalist spirit. As rector of Freiburg University, Heidegger delivered an address in May 1933 in which he praised Schlageter for answering the “call” of the German Volk. Heidegger said Schlageter’s martyrdom symbolized the agony of the German people at the end of World War I. Like the Volk, Schlageter had been betrayed in his great struggle. Now Heidegger urged the students to carry on Schlageter’s work of national renewal:

Student of Freiburg, let the strength of the autumn sun of this hero’s native valley shine into your heart! Preserve both within you and carry them, hardness of will and clarity of heart, to your comrades at the German universities.5

He was also the subject of a play, Schlageter, written by Hanns Johst, that premiered on Hitler’s 44th birthday on April 20, 1933, and was dedicated to the Führer. Throughout the play, Schlageter appears as a savior, leading the Volk out of darkness to a new dawn. His heroic example would redeem the martyred nation. In the play, Schlageter was portrayed as a pure Nazi hero who completely rejected the culture of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The famous line “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun,” falsely attributed to Göring, originated in Johst’s play:

I know all about that crap from 1918… brotherhood, equality, and freedom… Beauty and worthiness! Then in the middle of it, hands up! You’re disarmed . . . you’re the trash of the Republic! — No to hell with this whole ideological smorgasbord.. . . Now we’ll cut loose! When I hear the word culture . . . I uncock my Browning!6

The end of the play shows Schlageter bound to a stake where his last words serve as a Nazi version of Jesus’s Great Commission: “Germany! A final word! A wish! Command! Germany! Awake! Catch fire! Burn! Burn wildly!”7 No doubt, Johst’s Schlageter was a faithful accolade to the spirit of Hitler and the Third Reich.“The Wanderer in the Void”Unlike the Nazis, the immediate reaction of the KPD to Schlageter’s death was to condemn him as merely a capitalist mercenary: “We communists have no reason to spare these bourgeois elitists whose murders of communists and workers are celebrated as deeds of heroism.”8 Yet this was not the last word on Schlageter from the far left. As Germany lurched toward revolution in 1923, the Communist International was alarmed by the rise of fascism and how to combat it. In Moscow in early June, the Comintern’s Executive Committee held the first major discussion in the workers’ movement on the causes and nature of fascism. One of the speakers was the German communist Clara Zetkin, whose report spoke about the threat posed by fascism: “Fascism confronts the proletariat as an exceptionally dangerous and frightful enemy. Fascism is the strongest, most concentrated, and classic expression at this time of the world bourgeoisie’s general offensive.”9 Zetkin argued fascism was an expression of capitalist crisis and a sign that bourgeois institutions were breaking down. The crisis itself was characterized by intensified attacks on the working class and sectors of the petty bourgeoisie who were sinking to the level of the proletariat. Zetkin highlighted that the rise of fascism was based upon the working class’s failure to seize power and establish socialism. Due to this failure, many workers grew disillusioned along with those who looked to communists for a way out of the crisis. As a result, fascism

became an asylum for all the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned. And what they no longer hoped for from the revolutionary proletarian class and from socialism, they now hoped would be achieved by the most able, strong, determined, and bold elements of every social class. All these forces must come together in a community. And this community, for the fascists, is the nation. They wrongly imagine that the sincere will to create a new and better social reality is strong enough to overcome all class antagonisms.10

In a crisis situation, Zetkin said that fascism was an instrument of the bourgeoisie to hold onto power. If the crisis becomes acute, then the bourgeoisie will begin funding fascist blackshirts to counter the threat of proletarian revolution. A major characteristic of fascism was the use of organized force to attack and destroy all working-class organizations. She claimed that fascism could play this role because it was not like traditional counterrevolution. Fascism was a mass movement based among the petty bourgeoisie threatened by capitalist collapse. To gain support from this class, fascists utilized anti-capitalist rhetoric. Zetkin argued that fascism’s revolutionary demagogy was just a ruse:

But [fascism] consists everywhere of an amalgam of brutal and terrorist violence together with deceptive revolutionary phraseology, linking up demagogically with the needs and moods of broad masses of producers.11

To defeat fascist terror required action by workers’ defense guards and a united front involving all working-class organizations. However, Zetkin said that if communists wanted to defeat fascism utterly, then military means were not enough. They had to either win over or neutralize many of those attracted to fascism:

We must remain aware that, as I said at the outset, fascism is a movement of the hungry, the suffering, the disappointed, and those without a future. We must make efforts to address the social layers that are now lapsing into fascism and either incorporate them in our struggles or at least neutralize them in the struggle. We must employ clarity and force to prevent them from providing troops for the bourgeois counterrevolution.12

Karl Radek’s speech “The Wanderer in the Void” appeared to answer Zetkin’s question. He began by thanking Zetkin for her “comprehensive and deeply impressive report… on international fascism,” but noted that he had “difficulty following it, because there hovered before my eyes the corpse of a German fascist, our class opponent, who was condemned to death and shot by the thugs of French imperialism — a powerful organisation of another section of our class enemy.”13 For Radek, Schlageter was the key to understanding the appeal of fascism and how communists could fight it. Radek noted that Schlageter was a “courageous soldier of the counterrevolution” who deserved to be “honoured by us, the soldiers of the revolution.”14 He said that Schlageter represented petty-bourgeois forces who were attracted to the nationalist appeal of fascism and that the Comintern needed to find paths to reach them:

[We] believe that the great majority of the nationalist-minded masses belong not in the camp of the capitalists but in that of the workers. We want to find the road to these masses, and we will do so. We will do everything in our power to make men like Schlageter, who are prepared to go to their deaths for a common cause, not wanderers into a void, but voyagers into a better future for the whole of humanity. That they should not spill their eager, unselfish blood for the profit of the coal and iron barons, but in the cause of the great toiling German people, which is a member of the family of peoples fighting for their emancipation.15

He observed that Schlageter fought against the communists and “regarded the working class as a mob that must be governed.”16 Despite his false consciousness, Radek believed that Schlageter was a true believer in his cause: “We have no reason to believe that it was from selfish motives that Schlageter helped to subdue the starving miners.”17 Despite his pure motives, Radek said that Schlageter was deceived by the bourgeoisie: Schlageter read in the newspapers how the very people who pretend to be the patrons of the German nationalist movement sent securities abroad so that they might be enriched and the country impoverished. Schlageter certainly could have no hope in these parasites.18

Compared to the cowardly German bourgeoisie, Radek said it was the workers who were leading the struggle against the French in the Ruhr. In the coming days, it would fall to the proletariat — not the bourgeoisie — to free Germany. Therefore, Radek concluded it was necessary for communists to position themselves as leaders in the struggle for national liberation:

That is what the German Communist Party and the Communist International have to say at Schlageter’s graveside. It has nothing to conceal, for only the complete truth can pave the way to the suffering masses of Germany, torn by internal strife. The German Communist Party declares openly to the nationalist petty-bourgeois masses that those working in the service of the profiteers, the speculators, and the iron and coal magnates to enslave the German people and to drive them into adventures will meet the resistance of the German Communist workers, who will oppose violence with violence. We will fight with all the means at our disposal against those who, from lack of comprehension, ally themselves with the mercenaries of capital.19

There were no immediate objections from anyone present to Radek’s words. Most Communists accepted Radek’s analysis with little to no reservations. Zetkin voiced her approval: “The noble and profound words of Radek touched my spirit as an old fighter. They sum up the situation and our task.”20 Only the French communist Alfred Rosmer sensed any potential dangers in Radek’s approach:

Radek’s unbelievable declamation was not designed to ease the task of worker militants who had given their activity a carefully judged orientation. On the other hand, it was of great value to the Social Democratic leaders who were remaining passive in face of the advances of the National Socialists and were glad to have a pretext — which seemed excellent — to denounce the ‘collusion of the Communist and fascist leaders’.21

Radek’s speech did not represent his own individual opinion. Rather, he was instructed to deliver it at the urging of the Comintern leadership. As Radek explained at the Fifth Comintern Congress in July 1924: “The Schlageter speech…was given at the [Third] Enlarged Plenum of the Executive Committee with the agreement — not just silent but written — of the chairman of the Executive Committee [Zinoviev].”22 Grigory Zinoviev was the President of the Comintern and a popular Bolshevik leader. As the Russian Revolution degenerated in conditions of isolation, Zinovievism as a distinct political tendency came into existence, representing the interests of the emerging Soviet bureaucracy. While still committed to many of Bolshevism’s goals, Zinovievism showed itself open to opportunist and bureaucratic maneuvers. At the same time, the Comintern did not contemplate any ideological concessions to fascism. This was evidenced by the fact that the Comintern Executive adopted a resolution calling for an all-out struggle against fascism:

The conscious revolutionary vanguard of the working class has the task of taking up the struggle against victorious fascism in Italy and the fascism now taking shape around the world. It must disarm and overcome fascism politically and must organise the workers into strong and successful self-defence against its violent actions.23

According to the historian E. H. Carr, “[The Schlageter line] was conceived, not as an attempt to bring about a working alliance with German Fascists against the Versailles treaty, but as an attempt to split their ranks by proving that effective opposition to the Versailles treaty could in the long run be offered only by the communists; it could therefore be logically reconciled with the continuation of a vigorous campaign against Fascism.”24 By adopting the “Schlageter line,” the KPD now had to carefully balance two tasks. On the one hand, they needed to unite all Germans against the Ruhr occupation, which potentially included the nationalist right. On the other hand, they had to fight those who supported the bourgeoisie, which included most of the nationalists. It remained to be seen if the KPD could walk this delicate tightrope.National BolshevismRadek’s Schlageter line bore striking similarities to an earlier strategy developed in 1919. After the signing of the Versailles Treaty, two KPD members, Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim, argued that Germany was now a “proletarian nation” and it must wage a war of liberation allied with Soviet Russia to free itself from the Allies. Laufenberg and Wolffheim envisioned their strategy as a bridge fusing rightwing nationalism and leftwing class struggle. In this “revolutionary war” the German working class would create a red army that would welcome members of the Freikorps and the officer corps. They presented these ideas to Radek, who mockingly coined the term “national Bolshevism” to describe their theory. As he said later: “In the year 1919 Laufenberg proposed a farrago of communism and nationalism. We declare frankly that one cannot play tricks with ideas and mixtures out of ideas.”25 Yet Radek did not categorically reject national Bolshevism. Even though the party could not tolerate “petty-bourgeois prejudices” in its ranks, it was possible that “under certain future conditions…the Communist Party can establish contact with national Bolshevism.”26 He stated that the KPD must offer a helping hand to sincere bourgeois nationalists and that nationalism could be one of the roads to communism: “Concern for the national question can also be one of the paths leading to Communism.”27
Others in the Comintern made no such concessions and viewed national Bolshevism as utterly ridiculous. Lenin condemned the strategy as a “preposterous absurdit[y].”28 Elsewhere, he argued that it was an “unnatural bloc between the Black Hundreds and the Bolsheviks,”29 and warned that attempting to ally communism with the far right would inevitably end in betrayal: “If you form a bloc with the German Kornilovites, they will dupe you.”30 Ultimately, Laufenberg and Wolffheim left the party and became founding members of the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD) in 1920. They were soon kicked out of the KAPD too. One of the conditions for the KAPD attending the second congress of the Comintern in 1920 was the expulsion of national Bolsheviks from their ranks. Afterward, Laufenberg retired from politics while Wolffheim moved to the fringes of the Nazi party. By 1923, Radek believed that conditions in Germany had changed. He argued that Laufenberg and Wolffheim’s national Bolshevism “signified an alliance to rescue the generals who had immediately after the [November 1918] victory smashed the Communist Party.”31 Now he claimed that

national Bolshevism signifies the pervasive feeling that salvation is to be found only through the Communists. We represent today the only road forward. Strong emphasis on the nation in Germany today is a revolutionary act, just as it is in the colonies.32

For Radek, the French occupation had reduced Germany to a colony, changing the significance of the national question. Now he concluded it was the duty of the KPD to lead all classes in a struggle for national liberation and social revolution.The Schlageter lineRadek’s Schlageter speech was published throughout Germany and the KPD adopted the new line with gusto. Over the course of July and August, the KPD launched a mass campaign to reach German nationalists. The most publicized elements of the Schlageter line were the debates held between the KPD and the Nazis. Many of these debates were held in Nazi strongholds on university campuses where they addressed the theme “Why Did Schlageter Die?” On August 2, KPD leader Hermann Remmele addressed a Nazi meeting and declared: “They told you that Communism would take everything from you. But it is capitalism that has taken everything from you!”33 His words were greeted with great applause. Other Communist speakers declared: “The time is not far off when the Völkische and the Communists will be united.”34 To win over nationalists, KPD leader Ruth Fischer was willing to utilize anti-semitic demagogy:

Whoever cries out against Jewish capital … is already a fighter for his class [Klassenkämpfer], even though he may not know it. You are against the stock market jobbers. Fine. Trample the Jewish capitalists down, hang them from the lampposts. … But … how do you feel about the big capitalists, the Stinnes, Klöckner? Only in alliance with Russia, Gentlemen of the völkische side, can the German people expel French capitalism from the Ruhr region.35

Fischer’s rhetoric was not an isolated incident in the KPD. On August 7, Rote Fahne printed an article that accused prominent members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of being connected to Jewish capitalists.36 Other Communists attempted to steer clear of anti-semitism but found it unavoidable when addressing Nazi crowds. For example, Remmele spoke to a mixed Nazi and Communist crowd in Stuttgart, where he told them that anti-semitism was a tool of the ruling class to distract workers from the real causes of their exploitation. After being interrupted by Nazis, he conceded that there was a “rational kernel” in anti-semitism:

How such anti-Semitism arises I can easily understand. One merely needs to go down to the Stuttgart cattle market in order to see how the cattle dealers, most of whom belong to Jewry, buy up cattle at any price, while the Stuttgart butchers have to go home again, empty-handed, because they just don’t have enough money to buy cattle. (‘Quite right!’ from the Fascists.)37

Later in his speech, Remmele told the crowd that fighting Jewish finance capital was only half the battle:

You, the Fascists, now say [that you want] to fight the Jewish finance capital. All right. Go ahead! Agreed! (Stormy applause from the Fascists.) But you must not forget one thing, industrial capital! (Interjections from the Fascists: ‘We fight that too!’) For finance capital is really nothing else but industrial capital.38

On August 10, Remmele told an audience of 8,000 that he considered a KPD alliance with the Nazis to be less objectionable than one with the Social Democrats. Speaking out of the other side of his mouth, he also let it be known that the KPD was willing to unite with the murderers of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in the SPD.39

At the insistence of the Nazi leaders, the debates with the Communists ended abruptly on August 14. For the remainder of the revolutionary days of 1923, the KPD and the Nazis went their separate ways. The judgment of historians on the Schlageter line is mixed. Some have attempted to minimize the line as merely a brief turn by the party that did little lasting damage. In The German Revolution, 1917–1923, the Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué says, “Communist orators sometimes let themselves get carried away in their desire to please their audiences and made dangerous concessions to them.”40 However, he concludes that “the ‘Schlageter line’… corresponded to the needs of the time — and history has proved this to be correct — even if its application went awry at times.”41 Another Trotskyist historian, Chris Harman, states that the Schlageter speech was distinct from both earlier and later forms of national Bolshevism. While the Schlageter line was an “error,” Harman concludes that it was “not the criminal lunacy that some have said.”42 This position is supported by E. H. Carr, who says that the Schlageter line represented a short-term maneuver by the KPD to split the social base of the nationalist right. Still, he argues that the Nazis benefited more than the KPD:

It may fairly be said that both sides [KPD and Nazis] embarked on the project with their eyes open and with full appreciation of the aims of their partners. In the long run the Fascists perhaps showed more skill in using the communists to serve their ends than the communists in using the Fascists.43

The most negative appraisal of the Schlageter line is given by the historian Werner Angress in Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid For Power In Germany, 1921–1923. According to Angress, the Schlageter line “aroused much attention but netted the party few, if any, tangible advantages.”44 Angress argues that while the petty bourgeoisie was acutely suffering in 1923, this did not translate into support for the KPD: “Few of them could be convinced that the German Communists held the answer to their troubles.”45 Furthermore, many of these social layers believed that the KPD’s nationalist rhetoric was insincere. Angress believes that the KPD was not committed to any single line but was open to any approach in support of their main goal of mobilizing the labor movement against the German state. Like Broué, Harman, and Carr, Angress concludes that the Schlageter line represented a short-term tactical move by the party and not a fundamental revision of their politics:

The Schlageter line was merely one of these tactical moves; it was not considered an all-or-nothing proposition, but was held to serve a useful purpose even if it achieved no more than the neutralization of certain segments of the population ordinarily hostile to Communism.46

Acknowledging all the caveats that the Schlageter line was only a tactical move and not a permanent one, it can be concluded that it brought no political benefit to the communists. For one, the embrace of German nationalism undermined efforts to win over French soldiers in the Ruhr. This also helped to isolate the French Communist Party and their efforts to build solidarity between French and German workers.47 Second, the statements by Remmele and others that they were willing to form an alliance with the Nazis was in violation of the KPD’s official united-front policy with social democracy. The opportunism of the Schlageter line could only make forming a united front with the SPD more difficult. Finally, the Schlageter line did not win over any great number of the petty bourgeoisie to the KPD. Despite the KPD wearing nationalist colors, the parties and leaders of the middle class only saw Marxist red. For the nationalist right, the communists were always the party of class struggle, revolution, and internationalism. No matter how many compromises or tactical maneuvers they made, the KPD could never shake off their revolutionary origins.National Bolshevism in the Third PeriodThe Schlageter line was not the last time that the KPD used nationalist rhetoric. In 1928, the now Stalinist-led Comintern launched the Third Period, proclaiming revolution was on the immediate agenda in the capitalist world. As part of this new line, the Comintern declared that social democrats were now “social-fascists” and the main enemy. In Germany, the KPD again mixed nationalist phraseology with their calls for proletarian revolution. In the KPD’s August 1930 election program, they called for a German soviet republic but also advocated German national liberation.48 Some months later in January 1931, the KPD formally adopted the program of a “people’s revolution,” which they proclaimed was the “chief strategic slogan of the party.”49 This was another example of the KPD using the same terms as the Nazis — who also called for a “people’s revolution” — to win over their supporters. In their campaign, the KPD attempted to portray themselves as better defenders of German national interests than the Nazis. In a May 1932 debate, the KPD countered Nazi arguments on “Jewish capitalism” in the following manner: “The Nazis only want to overthrow a section (the Jewish section) of capitalism and leave the rest in existence, but Communism would uproot every last vestige of capitalism.”50 Through the use of Völkisch rhetoric, the KPD was able to win over some members of the SA to their ranks, including prominent figures such as Richard Scheringer.
Overall, the KPD’s approach was deeply mistaken. Having already rejected any united front with the SPD, the Communists failed to differentiate between the reformist consciousness of social democrats and the counterrevolutionary rage of Nazi Stormtroopers. While the SPD defended capitalism, this did not mean they were the equivalent to the Nazis. In 1933, the KPD’s failure to form a united front with the SPD ended in disaster. In addition, the slogan of “people’s revolution” did not weaken the Nazi’s nationalist appeal, but merely served to baffle revolutionary workers. As Trotsky noted: “As a slogan, it is inane and charlatanism, market competition with the fascists, paid for at the price of injecting confusion into the minds of the workers.”51Marxist principles, mass work, and anti-fascismWhatever else can be said, the debates of 1923 pose genuine questions for revolutionaries: How should Communists understand fascism’s appeal to the petty bourgeoisie? What is the best approach to win over and neutralize those attracted to fascism? There can be no principled objection to a political strategy designed to isolate and neutralize the forces of fascism. It can be answered unequivocally that the Schlageter line was the wrong answer in every respect to those questions. The practical result of the KPD’s national Bolshevism was tailing the fascist right. By using nationalist and anti-semitic slogans, the KPD was already conceding important ideological ground to fascists. This confused approach also carried with it the peril that sections of the working class could be won over to fascist ideas. Some advocates of populism such as the post-Marxist theorist Ernesto Laclau are oblivious to these dangers. In fact, Laclau believes that the KPD should have fully embraced the Schlageter line:

It is true that in [the Schlageter line] there were many opportunist elements and that its sporadic application only helped to weaken the German working class faced with Nazism… The correct position would have been to deepen this line and carry it to its logical conclusion: the abandonment of class reductionism.52

In his populist approach, Laclau fails to address the dangers of anti-semitism and nationalism found in the Schlageter line. Fascist campaigns against “Jewish capitalism” are not equivalent to the struggle against capitalism. This is for the simple reason that fascists are not revolutionaries opposed to capitalism, but only mimic the language and symbols of the far left. For fascists, protests against the system are not framed in terms of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but as a struggle between an authentic national community and a parasitic elite. This approach allows fascists to easily substitute racial struggle for class struggle with the bourgeoisie now portrayed as “international Jews.” In their irrationalist framework, the “Jew” becomes the evil puppet master pulling all the strings. The fascist crusade against “Jewish finance” takes on the appearance of a radical revolution, but in reality, it merely rescues a tottering capitalism. Therefore, the fascist call for getting rid of the “Jews” is a false solution to social contradictions since they only offer a pseudo-revolution in the first place. When it comes to embracing nationalism, Laclau forgets basic internationalist principles formulated in the Communist Manifesto: “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.”53 The development and expansion of capitalism creates the material basis for internationalism by creating a global working class. The starting point for workers in each country is not “their nation” but recognizing themselves as detachments of the international proletariat. In imperialist countries, nationalism justifies both papering over class divisions and colonial rule over oppressed peoples. Simply put: communists in oppressor nations cannot wave an imperialist flag without betraying their internationalist commitments. This is precisely what MAGA “Communists” and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) do when they embrace American chauvinism. Similarly, the electoralism and economism of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) means international solidarity takes a back seat to backing American nationalism and imperialist wars. In practice, they all find themselves supporting nationalism and opposed to both internationalism and socialist revolution. To build international unity, it is essential that workers in oppressed nations should not feel any misgivings from their comrades in oppressor nations. This means militant anti-racism and anti-imperialist internationalism must play a key role in forging equality and voluntary unity.
Even communist support for national liberation struggles by oppressed peoples is in pursuit of the same universalist goals. National liberation struggles have been a source of immense revolutionary energies by challenging imperialism. However, if the process of national liberation is to truly end class and national oppression, then this requires expression in terms of its guiding political program (i.e. communist and internationalist leadership). Otherwise, national liberation without the goal of communism will only end up changing the flag of the oppressors, as the Irish Marxist James Connolly warned. Contrary to Laclau or national Bolsheviks, communists cannot appeal to potential supporters of fascism with antisemitic demagogy or nationalist slogans to win them over to revolutionary politics. Rather, workers can only be won to communism with the weapons of Marxist reason. At the heart of Marxism is the self-emancipation of the working class. The working class freeing itself and becoming fit to rule society occurs through its own revolutionary activity. Creating a socialist society entails a level of political consciousness unprecedented in history. Yet in its class composition, the working class is uneven with different levels of consciousness and levels of development. As Trotsky noted:

In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common problems no otherwise than through an inner struggle of tendencies, groups and parties. It is possible, with certain qualifications, to concede that “a party is part of a class.” But since a class has many “parts” — some look forward and some back — one and the same class may create several parties.54

Therefore, the struggle for liberation requires the concentration of class-conscious workers in a communist party. As an organized vanguard, the party must provide a scientific socialist perspective to newly awakened layers to pull them away from backward ideas. The party operates as a combat organization to coordinate and lead the scattered and spontaneous struggles of the working class. Communists cannot control where people start from. It should not be surprising that many workers enter political life with irrational, mystical, and backward notions about how society works. However, it is possible for communists to “meet people where they are at” without politically adapting themselves to outworn prejudices and notions. Trotsky stressed that, in its mass work, a party must not adapt its program to momentary or backward moods of the masses, but must educate the workers on their historic mission:

We have repeated many times that the scientific character of our activity consists in the fact that we adapt our program not to political conjunctures or the thought or mood of the masses as this mood is today, but we adapt our program to the objective situation as it is represented by the economic class structure of society. The mentality can be backward; then the political task of the party is to bring the mentality into harmony with the objective facts, to make the workers understand the objective task. But we cannot adapt the program to the backward mentality of the workers, the mentality, the mood is a secondary factor — the prime factor is the objective situation. That is why we have heard these criticisms or these appreciations that some parts of the program do not conform to the situation.55

As evidenced by 1923, there are moments when Communists are under tremendous pressure to “bend with the wind” and tailor their politics to “where the people are at.” Resisting those pressures may lead to — hopefully temporary — isolation. Yet even when it is unpopular, communists must be ready to defend their political principles against those who advocate opportunist shortcuts. As Trotsky argued:

In [reactionary] conditions the task of the vanguard is, above all, not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: it must swim against the current. If an unfavorable relation of forces prevents it from holding political positions it has won, it must at least retain its ideological positions, because in them is expressed the dearly paid experience of the past. Fools will consider this policy “sectarian”. Actually it is the only means of preparing for a new tremendous surge forward with the coming historical tide.56

National Bolshevism, like every opportunist shortcut, is a dead end. There is no substitute for patient education and principled politics. Otherwise, communists will end up like the national Bolsheviks and other opportunists who are just wandering in the void.

 EndnotesAleksandr Dugin, Templars of the Proletariat (London: Arktos, 2023), 24; See also Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 453.Robert G. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany 1918-1923 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1952), 237. Among the pallbearers were Karl Kaufmann, the future Reichstaathalter of Hamburg; Erich Koch, Oberpräsident and Gauleiter of East Prussia; Viktor Lutze, Oberpräsident of Hannover and, after Röhm’s death, chief of staff of the Sturmabteilung; Hans Hayn, Sturmabteilung gruppenführer of Saxony.Quoted in Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1990), 28.Quoted in ibid. 37Martin Heidegger, “Schlageter (May 26, 1933),” in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 41.Quoted in Baird 1990, 36.Quoted in ibid. 37.Quoted in ibid. 28.John Riddell, The Communist Movement at a Crossroads: Plenums of the Communist International’s Executive Committee, 1922–1923 (Boston: Brill, 2018), 580.Ibid. 585.Ibid. 666.Ibid. 602.Ibid. 613.Ibid. 614.Ibid. 618.Ibid. 615.Ibid.Ibid. 616.Ibid. 617-18.Ibid. 618.Alfred Rosmer, Moscow Under Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 198.Quoted in Riddell 2018, 24.Ibid. 667.Edward H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia: The Interregnum 1923–1924 (London: Macmillan, 1954), 181.Ibid 184. See also Pierre Broué, The German Revolution 1917–1923 (Boston: Brill, 2005), 326.Quoted in Abraham Ascher and Guenter Lewy, “National Bolshevism in Weimar Germany: Alliance of Political Extremes Against Democracy,” Social Research, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter 1956): 454.Ibid.V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), 69.V. I. Lenin, “Speech Delivered at the Ninth All-Russia Conference of the Russian Communist Party,” Marxists Internet Archive.Quoted in Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 103.Riddell 2018, 445.Ibid. 445-46.Broué 2005, 729.Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 283. [Völkischer Beobachter was a Nazi newspaper]Werner T. Angress, Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 1921–1923 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 339–40. Years later, Fischer defended her remarks as follows: “At a meeting of Berlin University students organized by the Berlin party branch, I was the speaker. The attitude of the nationalists against capitalism was discussed, and I was obliged to answer some anti-Semitic remarks. I said that Communism was for fighting Jewish capitalists only if all capitalists, Jewish and Gentile, were the object of the same attack. This episode has been cited and distorted over and over again in publications on German Communism.” Fischer 1948, 283.Angress 1963, 340.Ibid. 341.Ibid.Broué 2005, 729.Ibid.Ibid. 730.Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923 (London: Bookmarks, 1982), 254.Carr 1954, 185-86.Angress 1963, 338.Ibid. 349.Ibid.Broué 2005, 729.E. H. Carr, Twilight of the Comintern, 1930-1935 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 24-25.Ibid. 31.Donny Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism, and the Working Class (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 113.Leon Trotsky, “Thaelmann and the “People’s Revolution” (April 1931),” Marxists Internet Archive.Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism – Fascism – Populism (London: New Left Books, 1977), 130.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ““Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Marxists Internet Archive.Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), 267.Leon Trotsky, “Discussions with Trotsky On the Transitional Program,” Marxists Internet Archive.Leon Trotsky, “Stalinism and Bolshevism,” Marxists Internet Archive.

Listen here.

Returning to the New Books Network is Doug Greene, here to discuss his book The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky (Routledge, 2024). Split into three main parts, the book first surveys Kautsky’s own life and thought, starting with his early interest in socialist politics and turn towards Marxism, followed by a slow but steady turn away from revolution and towards reform, believing parliamentary procedures were the best road to social transformation. The second part looks at the works of Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, all of whom offer critical responses to Kautsky’s reformism, and the reassertion of the importance of revolutionary thought to any Marxist project. The third and final part looks at the contemporary works of Lars Lih, Eric Blanc and Mike Macnair and their attempts to make Kautsky’s reformist practice the central pillar of the contemporary left. Throughout, Greene argues that the real lesson Kautsky offers is the dead-end of reformism to any revolutionary project.

 

Originally published by Left Voice .

You’ve just published a book about Karl Kautsky. I’m a historian of the socialist movement in Germany, and I can say that until recently, Kautsky was almost completely forgotten. He was remembered, if at all, as a target of polemics by Lenin and Trotsky. Yet there has been a minor Kautsky revival in the United States. The Kautsky debate began about five years ago with an article in Jacobin magazine. What do you think drew people to Kautsky around 2018–19, more or less a century after he betrayed socialism in the First World War?

The “resurrection” of Kautsky is a very interesting phenomenon. When Kautsky died in 1938, he had been largely disavowed by the revolutionary Left. Yet moderate leftists had no use for him either. After World War II, as social democracy abandoned socialism as even a long-term goal, they dispensed with Kautsky’s theoretical formulas. In fact, Kautsky’s reputation fell so far in the decades after his death that many people, as the joke went, thought his first name was “Renegade,” since they only knew him from Lenin’s pamphlet.

In a deeper sense, though, Kautsky never quite went away. Those who advocated a reformist or democratic socialism often returned to his ideas, even if credit to Kautsky went unacknowledged. For example, in the 1970s, a number of western European Communist Parties dropped their allegiance to Marxism-Leninism and the USSR, developing the ideas of “Eurocommunism.” Eurocommunists advocated a democratic road to socialism that bore a great deal of similarity to Kautsky’s ideas on parliament and the state. The Eurocommunists claimed not Kautsky but Antonio Gramsci as a source of inspiration for their reformism. This was mistaken, since Gramsci was a stalwart revolutionary who never advocated gradualism. The reason that Kautsky was not given credit is simple: for parties that were still nominally communist, Gramsci was a more acceptable figure than Kautsky. Basically, whenever anyone seeks a theoretical rationale for democratic socialism, Kautsky eventually comes up.

The United States represents an interesting example. In 2016, the Bernie Sanders campaign popularized all sorts of vague ideas about “democratic socialism.” At the same time, many debates surrounding Sanders were reflected in Jacobin magazine, which acted as an unofficial campaign organ. You also saw the growth of the moribund Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which went from roughly 5,000 members in 2016 to more than 25,000 by 2018, standing at roughly 78,000 today. Many of those joining DSA were politically new and trying to figure out what they meant by socialism.

For the more intellectual types in DSA and Jacobin, Kautsky appeared very attractive.  While you can find people with similar politics to Kautsky in the ranks of Communist Parties, such as Earl Browder or Palmiro Togliatti, they are all tainted with the brush of Stalinism to one degree or another, and no one could accuse Kautsky of that. That’s the first point. Second, Kautsky has an impressive résumé as an orthodox Marxist, at least on paper — far more than DSA’s founder, Michael Harrington, for example. Kautsky’s theoretical authority could be used in DSA to justify democratic socialist politics. Interestingly, the debates surrounding Kautsky are not only about him but also about using a Marxist veneer to justify supporting the Democratic Party and American imperialism.

You had written about Kautsky five years ago, looking at his trajectory from the “pope of Marxism” to a renegade. Now that you did a deep dive on his life, what surprised you?

I knew the basics of Kautsky’s life when I wrote that article. When I researched this book, I didn’t discover anything earth shattering that changed my view of the man. But one thing that did surprise me was Kautsky’s awareness of the SPD’s bureaucratization. He had seen from early on that the party apparatus was growing more bureaucratic and conservative. If you read some of his letters to Victor Adler, he could even be very perceptive about the SPD’s accommodation with the German state.

But he really had no concrete strategy to deal with it. Kautsky never believed that the party would give up its revolutionary program. When he pondered if social democracy would end up going from an underground movement to new oppressors (like Christianity), he discounted the possibility out of hand. He thought that the growth of the party and expansion of the productive forces would prevent that. He embraced a sort of “linear idiocy” — a mechanical and evolutionary notion that history would just take care of things. Even after 1914, when it was clear that the SPD could no longer be characterized as revolutionary, Kautsky kept up the illusion until the end.

Kautsky viewed social revolution as objective and “inevitable.” In other words, socialists just needed to patiently wait for it rather than actively organize. He had no program for fighting the party bureaucracy that involved creating a faction or a party with its own revolutionary program. Opposing bureaucracy in theory without a material force to smash it just leads to capitulation. Rosa Luxemburg herself only realized that very late in her struggles with the SPD, whereas Kautsky never understood this necessity at all.

Reading your book, I was surprised to learn that Kautsky experienced such a major radicalization under the influence of the 1905 revolution in Russia. He even said he had no differences with Luxemburg. Would you say that during this brief time, Kautsky defended revolutionary Marxist ideas?

It’s true that in 1905–6, during debates on the mass strike, Kautsky was at his most radical. He supported the mass strike and said that Germany was approaching “Russian conditions.” This debate found Kautsky allied with Luxemburg and opposed to more conservative figures in the party and the unions who recoiled from the mass strike.

For the revisionists, it may have looked like Kautsky was a revolutionary, but this was deceptive. Kautsky was always very talented at saying the right slogans even if his practice was found wanting. During these debates, the SPD passed several left-sounding resolutions favoring the mass strike — but with so many stipulations that they were made a dead letter. Kautsky briefly bemoaned this as a symptom of bureaucratization, but mostly took these resolutions as a genuine sign that the SPD was committed to mass strikes and revolution. So he did not become a full-blown revolutionary in 1905, and let himself be reassured by paper resolutions from the party apparatus.

Eric Blanc argued that Lenin is irrelevant to U.S. socialists today because there has never been a majority of the working class in a parliamentary democracy that has supported the perspective of a violent insurrection against the capitalist state. Blanc believes that socialists need to aim to win a majority in parliament, just as Kautsky propagated. How do you see Lenin’s relevance in established bourgeois democracies? (Blanc since seems to have given up on Kautsky and even the most watered-down versions of Marxist socialism in favor of American liberalism.)

This idea that we just need to “vote harder” for democratic socialists (or Democrats, in Blanc’s case), and that we can have socialism once we achieve 50 percent plus one, is not borne out by history. I think both Kautsky and Blanc make a fetish of elections and bourgeois democracy. For one, they overestimate the “democratic” character of bourgeois democracy and its toleration of socialist organizations. For example, the United States has a violent labor history of ruthlessly crushing strikes and unions. Leftist organizations have been the targets of repression in the Haymarket affair, multiple red scares, and Cointelpro. This is not even talking about the dozens of examples of the United States invading or using the CIA to stop even moderate social democracy abroad. Only someone who gets their view of the American government from a high school civics textbook could possibly think that this is a democratic country.

It is true that in normal times, there is generally not majority support in the working class for revolutionary alternatives. But there have been revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations in Germany 1919, Spain 1936, France 1968, Portugal 1974, and others. None of those instances led to a successful revolution for a variety of reasons, but we would be hard pressed to say revolutionary politics was marginal in those instances.

Lenin’s continuing relevance covers the whole gamut of revolutionary politics and strategy. Among his great insights are his understanding of the state and how to defeat it. One of Lenin’s great insights in State and Revolution is that the state is an instrument of class oppression that cannot be captured by the working class and instead must be smashed. This has been borne out by every revolution in history, whether the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution. It is not the ballot box but armed force that is required to break the back of the ruling class.

As a negative example, we can look at Salvador Allende and Chile in the 1970s to see what happens to those who attempt to reach socialism by voting for it. Allende was elected, but he was constrained by the rules of the existing state structure and did everything possible to appease the bourgeoisie. In 1973, the Chilean army showed how much respect it had for democratic niceties by overthrowing Allende in a bloody military coup. Ultimately, the advocates of the peaceful road to socialism kept the working class disarmed and thus ensured their defeat.

The original neo-Kautskyist was Lars Lih, who inspired the CPGB/Weekly Worker, which in turn inspired Cosmonaut and others. Lih’s main thesis was that Lenin was in perfect agreement with Kautsky until the Great Betrayal of August 4, 1914, when Kautsky and the majority of social democracy supported their own governments in the imperialist war. In Lih’s interpretation, Lenin simply continued Kautsky’s policies from before 1914. Would you agree with Lih’s thesis about Lenin’s “aggressive originality”? Was Kautsky the true “architect of the October Revolution”?

To begin, Lih has done some valuable work on Lenin. For one, he does challenge a great deal of anticommunist stereotypes that Lenin was some sort of elitist totalitarian. The Lenin that emerges from Lih is a Marxist who believes in the self-emancipation of the working class. Moreover, Lih correctly highlights Lenin’s debt to Kautsky. And if this was all Lih did, then there really wouldn’t be any reason to object to his ideas.

However, Lih goes much further and states that there were few, if any, breaks in Lenin’s political ideas. This means that he sees Lenin as largely Kautskyian. As a result, the distinctiveness of Leninism is erased. So instead of reading Lenin, we could just return to Kautsky. Yet Lih cannot see how Lenin broke with Kautsky on a host of issues. For example, Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party may have used Kautsky’s formulations, but it developed a unique revolutionary practice, foreign to the SPD’s parliamentarism. In the end, Lenin and the Bolsheviks showed in practice that they were revolutionaries, while Kautskyian social democracy was not.

In 1917, there were figures in the Bolshevik Party such as Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin who were associated with Kautsky’s stagism (in which democratic revolution is a prelude to socialist revolution). Lenin’s April Theses broke radically with Kautskyism by calling for soviet power and socialist revolution. In many respects, Lenin had come around to the essentials of the theory of permanent revolution championed by Trotsky. This was recognized as a break with Kautskyism by many social democrats such as Plekhanov and Bogdanov — and they knew their Kautsky very well! So, far from Kautsky being the architect of the October Revolution, it was the reverse. If Lenin and the Bolsheviks had followed Kautsky, they would have gone down to certain defeat.

While “right-wing” neo-Kautskyists like Jacobin support the Democratic Party without reservations, “left-wing” neo-Kautskyists like the Weekly Worker and Cosmonaut do call for class independence, but not as an immediate demand. As I’ve written elsewhere (and again here), their connection with Kautsky seems to lie in this strategic bifurcation: for now we will pursue class collaboration, but when the Big Day comes, we will suddenly call for a revolutionary rupture. What does Kautsky stand for in today’s strategic debates among socialists?

I honestly don’t think it is possible, even if there is a will (and I’m not convinced on that score), for deeply engrained reformism and class collaborationism to be suddenly transformed into class struggle and revolution. The simple fact of the matter is, if you spend years training someone to play basketball, you can’t abruptly throw them in a baseball uniform and expect them to play well. I think all this neo-Kautskyian talk about a break is empty because there is no will to do so. If someone has no problem supporting Bernie Sanders, AOC, and other Democrats for “the time being,” then they are not revolutionary Marxists but servants of the class enemy. The break with the bourgeois parties by Marxists either happens now or it does not happen at all.

In today’s debates, I think Kautsky serves as a role model for those advocating “reformist socialism” and support for the Democratic Party. In other words, Kautsky stands for a perspective diametrically opposed to anti-imperialism, internationalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and communism. Those championing Kautsky advocate a “long game” of working in bourgeois parties and parliaments before, somehow, voting their way to socialism. It will end in either co-option or defeat, but never in socialism. The Kautskyian perspective is one that should be forcefully rejected by every Marxist as fundamentally reformist, nationalist, and anticommunist.

Is there anything useful in Kautsky’s legacy? Would you recommend any of his books for young Marxists today?

If we are serious about the history of the Second International and Marxism, then it is important for radicals to read and understand Kautsky. It was not without reason that Kautsky was considered a major authority on socialism a century ago. I think reading his popularization of social democracy in the Erfurt Program is a worthwhile exercise. As a historian, I find many of Kautsky’s historical works, such as Democracy and Republicanism and The Foundations of Christianity, to be very valuable.

That said, Kautsky mostly serves as a negative example for communists today. Despite his rhetorical radicalism, Kautsky shrank from socialist revolution at the critical hour. His ideas of a democratic and parliamentary road did not show a peaceful and easier path to socialism. Rather, Kautsky’s ideas have been proven tragically wrong every time they’ve been tried. They don’t lead to socialism, but to catastrophe and defeat always and everywhere. That’s reason enough to reject Kautsky root and branch.

Instead, we should return to the revolutionary tradition of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky. Their work not only offers the most comprehensive criticism of Kautsky on all fronts but also possesses the necessary road map for victory. If we are serious about fighting capitalism, then it is necessary to return to revolutionary communism. Let us leave Kautsky dead and buried where he belongs.

Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (New York: Routledge, 2024), 224 pages, hardcover, $170, appearing June 6.

Originally published at Firebrand.

I’d like to begin with an anecdotetold by John Kautsky – grandson of Karl – from the 1960s. He recalled ahistorian named Georges Haupt who had many discussions among students about thehistory of the Second International. During those talks, the students alwaysreferred to the “Renegade Kautsky.” It suddenly hit him that they thought“Renegade” was Kautsky’s first name. In the decades after his death, this storyaccurately reflects how far Karl Kautsky had fallen into oblivion that even hisfirst name was forgotten. Instead, Kautsky was known by the pejorative monikergiven to him by Lenin in his polemic, The Proletarian Revolution and theRenegade Kautsky.

This was in marked contrast to Kautsky’s reputation in the early 20thcentury when he was the leading theoretician in the German Social DemocraticParty (SPD) and the Second International. So great was Kautsky’s authority thathe was known as the “Pope of Marxism.” Marxists ranging from Leon Trotsky, RosaLuxemburg, August Bebel, Eugene Debs, and V. I. Lenin viewed him as the main interpreterof scientific socialism. Yet at his death, Kautsky was largely ignored and reviledby the revolutionary left. So how did this happen? And why has there been aconscious effort to revive his political ideas by figures such as Lars Lih andEric Blanc? Why should communists care why Kautsky was wrong?

Karl Kautsky

To answer these questions, it is necessary to understand Karl Kautsky’s lifeand his main political ideas. Born in 1854 to a Czech-German family in Prague,Kautsky was radicalized during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. Followingthe Paris Commune of 1871, he identified himself with the forces of socialism.In the 1870s, Kautsky was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria(SPÖ) and later with the German SPD.

From the period of 1878-1890, theGerman SPD was illegal due to Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Legislation. The SPDhad a number of members abroad such as Kautsky who helped keep the party alive.Kautsky lived in Switzerland where he edited the paper Sozialdemokrat,the main theoretical journal for the SPD. Underground party activists risked agreat deal smuggling the paper back into the Reich. In 1883, Kautsky alsoformed the paper, Die Neue Zeit which soon became the premier socialistjournal in the world. Kautsky’s reputation as a socialist theoretician wasfurther solidified with The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (1887),which acted as an accessible guide to Marx’s Capital. This work wastranslated into multiple languages and became a popular introduction to Marxfor a whole generation.

After the SPD was legalized, theyadopted a new political program in 1891 known as the Erfurt Program. So greatwas Kautsky’s prestige that he (along with Eduard Bernstein) was entrusted withwriting the program. In the Erfurt Program, Kautsky said that the iron laws ofhistory condemned capitalism. From the ruins of bourgeois society, theproletariat must lead humanity to a socialist future. To reach socialism, itwas necessary to fuse Marxist theory with the working-class movement. Toaccomplish this merger between scientific socialism and the working class wasthe task of the SPD.

While the Erfurt Program championed the socialist cause, it also showcased theunderlying problems of Kautsky’s Marxism. First, his view of socialistrevolution was dictated by his Positivist and anti-dialectical evolutionaryworldview. Based on this schema, Kautsky saw revolutions as strictly objectivephenomena that socialists should patiently wait for rather than activelyorganize. This led Kautsky to believe that revolutionary activity by theworking class was unnecessary to reach socialism. Since capitalism wasinevitably fated to transform into socialism, Kautsky advocated a gradualiststrategy to build-up social democracy through parliamentary means. As a result,he viewed extra-parliamentary activity as dangerous forms of Blanquism and“ultra-leftism.”

Kautsky’s emphasis on the primacyof parliamentary struggle implied a certain viewpoint on the state. Earlier inthe 1880s, he had argued that there was no parliamentary path to socialism andthat the revolution would require armed force. By now, his own views onparliament had changed. He saw parliament as a neutral institution that couldbe used by both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In practice, this meant herejected the necessity for smashing the bourgeois state.

In the Erfurt Program, Kautsky codified the main tenets of the SPD’s Marxism.In addition, he seemingly reconciled the opposed camps of reform andrevolution. On the one hand, the party’s adherence to socialism showed that itwas marching with the forces of history. On the other hand, the day-to-dayadvocacy of reforms and parliamentarism allowed the SPD to steadily accumulateforces while patiently waiting for history to go its way. If party members wereable to live with this divorce between theory and practice, then Kautsky’ssolution would work. Yet when the time arrived to give clear answers torevolutionary questions, Kautsky found himself unable to do so. 

For the time being, Kautsky wasseen by both his friends and opponents as a stalwart orthodox Marxist. Duringdebates over the agrarian question, Kautsky defended the party program againstattempts to dilute the proletarian character of the party by making concessionsto petty-bourgeois interests. In the Millerand Affair – when a French socialistjoined a bourgeois cabinet – Kautsky was a major voice rejecting all socialistparticipation in bourgeois governments. Although at first, he argued thatsocialist participation might be deemed permissible in “exceptionalcircumstances.”

The first major challenge toKautsky’s orthodoxy occurred in 1898 with the revisionist controversy. EduardBernstein, a leading party theoretician, argued that it was necessary for theSPD to “revise” its program by dropping Marxism, proletarian revolution, andthe class struggle. Instead, the SPD should become what it already was inpractice, a party of social reform. In the ensuing debate with Bernstein,Kautsky stood with anti-revisionists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Georgi Plekhanov,and Alexander Parvus.

Even though Kautsky came out indefense of Marxist orthodoxy, he conceded a great deal to Bernstein in thedebates. For one, he did not defend the monistic character of dialecticalmaterialism and was agnostic on philosophical questions. Secondly, he did notthink capitalism was fated to break down. Thirdly, even though he defended thedictatorship of the proletariat, Kautsky said that it was not an immediateconcern for the SPD. Nor did his conception of revolution call for smashing thebourgeois state and its replacement with a semi-state on the Paris Communemodel.

Finally, Kautsky drew no organizational conclusions from the revisionistcontroversy. Like the revisionists, Kautsky believed that party unity wassomething to be maintained at all costs. He considered it an article of faiththat the unity of social democracy was identical with the unity of the workingclass. For Kautsky, the SPD was the party of the whole working class – not inthe sense of recruiting all workers into the party – but that all tendencieswhich regarded themselves as socialists should be members of the same party.The SPD believed expulsions would endanger the unity of the working class. Thismeant that the expulsion of Bernstein and other revisionists was rejected bythe SPD and Kautsky. Since no organizational conclusions were drawn from therevisionist controversy, this allowed reformist forces to remain inside theparty.

Seemingly the forces of Marxist orthodoxy emerged triumphant over therevisionists at various party congresses. Yet nothing fundamentally changed inthe SPD, which remained reformist in its day-to-day practice. Over the comingyears, Kautsky’s gradualism and identification with the SPD apparatus becamemore overt.

In 1905-06, there was an upsurge ofthe class struggle in Germany and many cadres such as Rosa Luxemburg debatedemploying the mass strike. However, the SPD shrank from using the mass strike sinceit conflicted with their gradualist strategy. In addition, the unions were moreconcerned with protecting their apparatus and winning bread-and-butter gainsthan advancing a revolutionary strategy. Rhetorically the party passedresolutions favoring mass strikes, but with so many stipulations that they provedto be empty. Kautsky was aware of the SPD’s bureaucratization, but he viewedleftist-sounding resolutions as a genuine commitment to the mass strike andrevolution.

In 1910, the debate on the massstrike flared up again. During a campaign against Germany’s restrictiveelection system, Rosa Luxemburg advocated mass strikes and raising the demandfor a republic. Like the SPD, Kautsky feared a confrontation with the Kaiser.Instead, he advocated the “strategy of attrition” that would avoid mass strikesby building up the forces of the SPD. This was simply parliamentarism byanother name. By 1912, Kautsky had positioned himself as the “Marxist Center”opposed equally to the revolutionary left and the revisionist right.

When it came to imperialism, Kautsky’s views shifted wildly over his life. Inhis most radical work The Road to Power (1908), he saw imperialism as anew stage of capitalism which was leading to war. In this work, he took apessimistic view of any bourgeois campaigns for disarmament. While Kautskysupported independence for the colonies, he did not back national liberationstruggles, believing that history would take care of the colonial question.

Kautsky’s position on imperialism changed abruptly after 1908. Now heconsidered imperialism to be a bad policy and not something intrinsic to thelatest stage of capitalism. He argued that most of the bourgeoisie did not havean economic interest in imperialism. Therefore, it was possible for socialiststo join with “pro-peace” sections of the bourgeoisie in common opposition to war.

All these debates on imperialismwere put to the test in 1914 with the start of World War I. The outbreak of warmeant that the German SPD had to decide what position its parliamentarydeputies would take toward voting on war credits: should they remain true totheir anti-imperialist resolutions or support the fatherland? Kautsky was not aparliamentary deputy but he was invited to give advice to the SPD delegation.He argued that the party could not abstain but should vote for funding providedthat the government committed itself to a purely “defensive” war.

Kautsky’s approach to WWI wasconsistent with his overall politics. Despite his opposition to imperialism,Kautsky could not envision revolutionary resistance to the German bourgeoisie.In fact, he concluded that the Second International had no role to play in warsince it was purely an instrument of peace.

Just as the war began, Kautsky revealedhis theory of “ultra-imperialism.” He admitted that imperialism was behind the warbut claimed that the bourgeoisie had a desire to maintain the current systemand avoid future wars. Thus, it was possible for capitalists to pursue a differentpolicy of organized capitalism or ultra-imperialism by renouncing militarismand jointly exploiting the world together. Kautsky’s prediction of a peacefulcapitalism related to his hopes for the postwar world. Ultra-imperialism wouldeffectively return the world to the status quo antebellum and would allow theparty to return to the “road to power” that had been “only” temporarily derailedin 1914.

As the war dragged on, Kautsky found himself in opposition to the SPD’s uncriticalsupport for the German government. By 1915, he joined with other centristforces who opposed the war and called for a “peace without annexations orindemnities.” Despite opposition to the war, Kautsky advocated no concretestrategy at all. The centrist position stood in sharp contrast to revolutionaryleftists such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht who believed that “the mainenemy was at home.” Their approach of revolutionary defeatism meant sabotage,mutinies, strikes, and proletarian revolution in every belligerent nation toend the war.

In November 1918, the Kaiser was overthrown and a new republic was declared inGermany. However, it remained an open question of which class ruled Germany. Onthe one side was the SPD defending the bourgeoisie and on the other was the newlyformed Communist Party standing for the working class. In his typical fashion,Kautsky advanced a program to appease both sides. He championed the supremacyof parliament but also supported workers councils to keep watch on electedrepresentatives. While he advocated socialization of the economy, he emphasizedthat this did not mean socialism. In the end Kautsky’s solutions were rejectedby everyone across the political spectrum. There was no space for the “MarxistCenter” as Germany descended into semi-civil war.

By now, Kautsky had lost the mantle of revolutionary Marxism to Lenin andBolshevism. From the moment that the Russian workers stormed the Winter Palace,Kautsky was bitterly opposed to them. To him, Lenin and communism represented abetrayal of every principle of Marxist orthodoxy. He considered a socialistrevolution in backward Russia to be a historical abomination. Instead of sovietpower, Kautsky advocated the Constituent Assembly with its program of bourgeoisdemocracy, which he believed would have avoided the horrors of terror and civilwar. Over the final two decades of his life, Kautsky launched a ceaselessideological crusade against Bolshevism. For Kautsky, the Soviet Union andcommunism were the greatest dangers to the working class, surpassing by farwestern imperialism, Mussolini, and Hitler.

During the 1920s, Kautsky believedthat the era of revolutionary storms had passed and democracy was now firmlyimplanted in Germany. When the Depression happened in 1929 and the forces ofNational Socialism began to grow, he rejected any united front with theCommunists. He believed that the social democratic vote would stop Nazism cold.Besides that, Kautsky defended the SPD’s support for the “lesser evil” of Paulvon Hindenburg as buying precious time to preserve democracy. Somehow, heforgot that Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the position of chancellor. Evenafter Hitler came to power, Kautsky concluded that the SPD’s only course underWeimar had been a purely parliamentary one since a revolution would havedestroyed Germany. If nothing else, Kautsky never questioned that the SPD wouldeventually resume its parliamentary road to power. When Kautsky died in October1938 in exile, his faith in a democratic socialist future remained unbroken.

Eurocommunism and Neo-Reformism

In the following years, Kautsky wasignored by all camps of the revolutionary left. After 1945 as social democratsformally rejected socialism as even a long-term goal, they found little needfor Kautsky’s theoretical formulas. Yet his ideas continued to haunt thoseinterested in reformist socialism. In the 1970s, there was a revival ofKautsky’s political ideas from a seemingly unlikely source: the communistparties. By now, the western Communist Parties dropped their Marxism-Leninismand allegiance to the USSR, replacing it with democratic socialism. This theoryof Eurocommunism was not actually new, but simply the Communist Partiesaligning their theory with a decades-long practice of popular frontism.

The Eurocommunist strategy of a peaceful transition to socialism claimed to befollowing not Kautsky, but Antonio Gramsci’s “war of position.” Yet this was adistortion of Gramsci who never advocated any form of socialist gradualism. Thereason why Kautsky was not invoked by name is quite simple. For parties thatstill claimed to be nominally communist, Gramsci was considered a moreacceptable source of theoretical inspiration than Kautsky.

The most consistent follower ofKautsky in the latter half of the 20th century was the ChileanSocialist Salvador Allende. In 1970, Allende was elected President of Chile ona program of a peaceful and parliamentary road to socialism. Like Kautsky,Allende had an almost religious faith in the institutions of parliament andbourgeois democracy. Yet the army and the CIA had no such respect for theChilean Constitution, and they overthrew Allende in a bloody military coup onSeptember 11, 1973.

In the early 21st century, there has been the emergence of neo-reformistand broad left parties such as Die Linke in Germany and SYRIZA in Greece. Theseparties have promised a change from ordinary politics. Yet in power, they havesupported imperialism, austerity, and racist attacks on migrants, which haveleft their supporters dispirited and disoriented. At worst, their record has discreditedsocialism and opened the door to the fascist right to appear as an alternativeto the system. The balance sheet of these reformist parties is capitulation tothe power of capitalism, which has proven disastrous to the prospects ofsocialism.

The Neo-Kautskyians: Lars Lih

The contemporary neo-Kautskyianrevival owes a great deal to historiographical debates surrounding the RussianRevolution. For decades, anticommunist scholars dominated discussion onBolshevism with their claims that Lenin was an elitist who detested the workingclass and had a lust for totalitarian power. Serious challenges to thisanticommunist consensus began to be raised in the 1970s onward by figures suchas Neil Harding, Marcel Liebman, Hal Draper, Moira Donald, and others.

A major element of this new approach to Lenin involved looking at the influenceof Kautsky on his thought. The main person promoting the links between Leninand Kautsky is the Canadian academic Lars Lih. His central thesis is thatLenin’s basic ideas were largely set after his adoption of Kautsky’s Marxism inthe 1890s. Thereafter, Lenin’s theory and practice remained Kautskyian untilthe end of his life. In his magnum opus, Lenin Rediscovered (2005), Lihstates that Lenin did not advocate a “party of a new type” in his classic work Whatis to be Done? Rather, Lih argues that Lenin’s entire conception of theparty was drawn from Kautsky and the Erfurt Program. It is important to notethat Lih does perform a valuable service in clearing up Cold War andanticommunist stereotypes of Lenin as an elitist totalitarian. The Lenin thatemerges from Lih is a principled Marxist who fervently believes that theworking class can liberate itself.

It is not possible to discuss Lih’s views on Lenin in detail, but some pointsneed to be stressed. If all Lih was doing was highlighting the influence ofKautsky on Lenin, then there would be no objection. As Lih correctly notes,Lenin himself recognized his debt to Kautsky. Yet Lih does much more than that.He claims there were few, if any, breaks in Lenin’s political ideas.

In fact, Lih ignores thedevelopment in Lenin’s political thought, particularly on the vanguard party.Unlike Kautsky, Lenin’s politics was dominated by what Georg Lukács called the“actuality of revolution.” This did not mean a proletarian revolution could beachieved at any moment. Instead, this conception defined a whole epoch whereevery action was seen as links in a chain leading to the larger goal ofrevolution. This viewpoint had implications for how Lenin envisioned the roleof a communist party. For Lenin, a vanguard party was not a vehicle forcollecting votes nor did it passively await the revolution. Even though arevolution is only possible in certain circumstances, this does not mean thatcommunists cannot prepare for it now. It was necessary for communists to carryout revolutionary work in non-revolutionary times to prepare themselves and theworking class for when the situation is ripe. To put it succinctly, communistsmust “hasten and await.”

This meant there is a night and day contrast between Kautsky’s SPDfunctionaries and a Bolshevik vanguard. As evidenced by their practice in theRussian underground and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the Bolshevikssuccessfully mobilized the working class against capitalism and the Tsar. TheSPD did not lead the German workers against the Kaiser but had them singingnationalist hymns as they were marched off to be slaughtered in the trenches ofFrance.

Theimplications of Lih’s approach to understanding Lenin and Bolshevism areenormous. Injudging Lenin as basically a Kautskyian, Lih stresses continuity over anytheoretical discontinuity. While Lenin emerged from within the SecondInternational and used its language and formulations, there was somethingradically new in what he developed from that raw material. By concluding thatLenin was just a follower of Kautsky, Lih erases anything distinctive aboutLeninism.

Lih’s effort to claim continuity between Lenin and Kautsky rests largely on a textualanalysis. Indeed, he is more than capable of unearthing documents and thencomparing them to find a common language. While this enables Lih to draw a lineof continuity from Lenin to Kautsky it is a purely surface-level approach. Onecould just as easily deploy Lih’s method and find that there is directcontinuity from Lenin to the present-day Communist Party of China due to theirshared Marxist language. Yet does anyone who looks deeper think that is true?

A different picture emerges ofLenin and Kautsky if we look at the material reality they operated in. Oncethis is done, we can see the different results of the two in practice. Leninismrepresented a new communist approach to revolution, while Kautskyism ended upas a cover for social democratic reformism. For Lih, it is sufficient to lookat someone’s ideas merely based on how they present them instead of looking attheir actual practice and distinctiveness. Lih’s formalism means he seespractice as almost a dirty activity and not worthy of attention. Yet thecentrality of revolutionary praxis to Lenin’s politics explains both hisdifferences with Kautsky and how he was able to lead in 1917.

Neo-Kautskyism: Eric Blanc

When it comes to the development of neo-Kautskyism, Lih performed a pivotalrole by discrediting Leninism with his promotion of Kautsky. Yet it was never Lih’sintention to connect these debates to contemporary politics since he is anindependent scholar who claims no political affiliation. Rather, he acts as ascholarly incubator for a neo-Kautskyism oriented toward political action foundin the work of Eric Blanc and others.

The immediate context for the emergence of neo-Kautskyism in the United Statescan be traced to the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign with its slogansof “democratic socialism.” The Sanders’ campaign also helped to revitalize thelargely moribund Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and spurred the growthof Jacobin Magazine. Between the two, a mass base now exists to discussdemocratic socialist ideas in the United States.

One of those who joined DSA wasEric Blanc, a Rutgers professor of labor studies. Originally a revolutionarysocialist, Blanc is now a vocal voice in DSA’s Bread and Roses Caucus. He is usinghis embrace of Kautsky to develop a political program for the left that seesthe Democratic Party as an instrument to advance socialist politics.

According to Blanc, Kautsky’s democratic socialism offers the best approach inadvanced capitalist societies such as the USA. He thinks that Leninist“insurrectionism” has always been a minority and elitist current among theworking class in democratic countries. As a concrete strategy, Blanc arguesthat socialists must focus on gaining an electoral majority based uponuniversal suffrage. He states that this strategy was a proven success in theFinnish Revolution of 1917-18.

There are a number of objections tobe made to Blanc’s claims. First, his characterization of “Leninistinsurrectionism” is a Cold War stereotype that views communists as elitist andindifferent to democracy. Based on the historical record, this is not true.During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks built up mass support amongworkers, peasants, and soldiers. It was also the Bolsheviks – and not their“democratic” opponents – who carried out the will of the people in the mostpopular revolution in history.

Secondly, Blanc is correct thatLeninists believe the bourgeoisie can only be overthrown by force. However,this strategy was not elitist or undemocratic as he claims. As Lenin noted,communists must utilize every possibility at their disposal to awaken theworking class in its struggle against the bourgeoisie. This means communistshave been at the forefront of struggles for increased democratic rights, oppositionto imperialist wars, and unionization. By contrast, democratic socialists havebeen more frequently found on the other side of the barricades.

Third, Blanc’s claim that workingclass support for revolutionary alternatives to parliaments is marginal is alsoopen to question. To be clear, it is true in normal times that only a minorityof the population is open to radical politics. Yet there have beenrevolutionary situations such as Germany 1918-19, Spain 1936-37, and France1968 where the current social order was called into question. None of those instancesblossomed into a successful revolution for a variety of reasons. However, itwould be wrong to say that a revolutionary alternative remained marginal inthose cases.

Fourth, Blanc makes a fetish of elections and bourgeois democracy. He seems tooverestimate the “democratic” nature of bourgeois democracy, believing that itcan facilitate the transition to socialism. The assumption that the existenceof a capitalist “democracy” makes insurrection outmoded greatly overstates itsdemocratic credentials and toleration of socialist organizations.

This is borne out not only in Chilebut by his own example of Finland in 1917-18. In Finland, the Social Democrats(SDP) were an avowed Kautskyian party who won a parliamentary majority in 1917.Like their German counterpart, the Finns pursued a strategy of passivelywaiting for a revolution. Rather than prepare the workers for the seizure ofpower, the Finnish leadership acted as a roadblock. When the social democratsdid come to power, they were not ready to fight the counterrevolution. As aresult, the Finnish Reds suffered a bitter defeat after a few months. In theaftermath, many SDP leaders reflected on their experience and becamecommunists. One wonders if the Finnish bloodbath of 1918 is Blanc’s example of“success” then what would a failure look like?

To achieve his vision of ademocratic socialist majority, Blanc believes that it is necessary for theworking class to have its own political party. To achieve this, he hasdeveloped a strategy known as the “dirty break.” Simply put: Blanc says thatdemocratic socialists must operate on the Democratic Party “ballot line” forthe time being before splitting off to form their own party. Instead of working-classself-activity, Blanc argues that “insurgent” Democrats such as Sanders and AOC havethe power to stimulate mass movements. All the rhetoric aside, its practicalresults have represented nothing more than backing the Democratic Party. Insteadof a “dirty break” we just have a “dirty stay.”

There is nothing original to Blanc’s “dirty break” beyond its dubioushistorical examples and branding. What is interesting about the “dirty break”is the role played by Kautsky in its development. His embrace of Kautsky andelectoralism meant the disappearance of extra parliamentary and mass struggles.The dirty break’s electoralism possesses an elitist fixation on reformist and“insurgent” politicians with supposed abilities to conjure up mass movements.Crediting Sanders or AOC for causing mass struggles is to mix up cause andeffect. It is like crediting the rooster’s crowing for causing the sun to rise.They did not create any movements but capitalized on them by siphoning offtheir energies into the safe channels of bourgeois politics. The track recordof Sanders and AOC in office has not amounted to any reforms. Not only are theyreformists who can’t reform, but they are indistinguishable from“Establishment” Democrats in their open support for imperialism, Israel, andwar.

Lastly, the dirty break’s logic follows a Kautskyian approach of linearevolution. Whereas Kautsky saw the ever-accumulation of votes leading tosocialism, Blanc sees the “dirty break” eventually ending in the creation of aworkers’ party. Yet how that change comes about is left unclear and the momentof the neo-Kautskyian “dirty break” never arrives.

Why Kautsky is Wrong

So why is Kautsky wrong? If we care about achieving socialism then it matterswhy Kautsky was wrong. While a revolutionary in theory, Kautsky was never ableto provide revolutionary leadership in practice. His political outlook wasrooted in gradualism which led him to conclude that socialism was inevitableand revolutionary activity by the working class was unnecessary. When facedwith the historical tests of World War I and the German Revolution, he shrankfrom revolution. In practice, if not in theory, Kautskyism has meant forsakingthe struggle for socialism.

The faith of Kautsky and hislatter-day followers in the “democratic road to socialism” is premised on blindfaith in elections and parliament. They promise a safer and easier road tosocialism. However, this fetishistic respect for the mechanisms of bourgeoisdemocracy that Kautsky championed can be judged by its tragic results inGermany, Finland, and Chile. Those who supported a Kautskyian strategy havenever achieved socialism anywhere. Rather their road ends everywhere incatastrophe and defeat. That conclusion is more than enough to reject Kautsky intoto.

If we don’t want to be wrong like Kautsky, then we should look to the work ofRosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. Together, their work forms athree-legged stool that offers the most all-embracing and astute critique ofKautsky’s methods and politics. Whether regarding party organization,philosophy, mass struggle, imperialism, strategy and tactics, the state, andproletarian revolution, their theoretical corpus offers a fundamental challengeto Kautskyism. Instead of resurrecting Kautskyism, if we are truly seriousabout fighting capitalism, then we should raise high the red banner ofrevolutionary communism once again.